Consolidation Trend in European LIMS Market

Consolidation is an increasing trend in western European laboratory information management systems (LIMS), as LIMS vendors seek to strengthen their product lines through mergers and acquisitions and co-marketing agreements. Revenues in this LIMS market are forecast to increase from U.S.$90 million in 2005 to $163.4 million in 2012, according to a new report from Frost & Sullivan (Palo Alto, CA, USA), an international consulting company.

Strategic partnerships can help vendors create more customer-driven, value-added product portfolios that can help expand the scope of LIMS, achieving high throughput that will aid the lead screening of pharmaceutical companies. However, consolidations bring together multiple solutions developed by various vendors, which forces an acquiring company to link various systems and streamline the communication between them while minimizing technical incompatibilities.

Therefore, a key challenge for LIMS vendors is to develop an open, standardized technology platform to ease end users' difficulties in understanding the technicalities of solution design and help them reduce training costs. As customers show increased demand for configurable off-the-shelf solutions that address their specific needs, the LIMS market is likely to progress from customization to configurability. This ensures a wide range of flexible solutions and offers venders an opportunity to add value to their product lines and thereby achieve strong product differentiation.

Vendors with good brand recognition will be able to penetrate the pharmaceutical user base with greater ease than new niche market participants. Besides, pharmaceutical companies tend to prefer vendors that have a proven history of efficient installations. However, unfavorable return-on-investment (ROI) and the existence of legacy systems could pose entry barriers to LIMS vendors.