Illumina announced in January at the JP Morgan Healthcare conference the NextSeq 500, which was trumpeted (at least at the level of press releases and public relations) of being available immediately. Knowing first-hand how difficult it is to launch a new system, I had expected the first systems to ship by the end of the first quarter (March), but here we are in mid-June and the first data is only now being reported on the NextSeq 500 system.
After a library is properly prepared, (remember it can be from many sources – randomly sheared genomic DNA, cDNA from a small RNA sample, an immunoprecipitated sample) the library molecules need to be amplified in some manner, before the sequencing takes place. Thus there is a critical need for accurate quantitation of the library DNA, whose importance can be overlooked.
In the roads I travel (and it is now over six years since I made that fateful move from being an ‘internal’ Product Manager to ‘customer-facing’ sales representative) the buying process is all about perceptions of the customer. Right or wrong, potential customers each receive the information from a local representative (from whichever vendor) and filter it through their own set of criteria. Opinions they read in their journals of choice, opinions from their valued collaborators and other friends in the research world, tidbits gathered from their post-docs, all form a perception in their mind about what a particular product’s value is to them.
“The future is already here – it’s just not very evenly distributed.” – William Gibson
This is a blog about next-generation sequencing and it’s intersection with marketing and business in general (primarily), which happens to be my particular area of professional expertise, having focused on next-generation sequencing since late 2006, when Illumina (my then-employer) acquired a startup called Solexa for $417M. I have had product development, product management, marketing (all in the San Diego area with Illumina) and key-account sales roles (in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US serving both the NIH and the entire SouthEast region with Illumina, RainDance Technologies and currently with Life Technologies). I am presently in a marketing role at Life Technologies Corporation (which used to be Applied Biosystems and Invitrogen Corporation), heavily involved with both the Ion Torrent PGM / Proton as well as the SOLiD / 5500 platforms. (More information about me can be found here; if you are interested in anything Ion Torrent and NGS market overall you’ve come to the right place.)