tranSMART Foundation Launches Online Marketplace
By Benjamin Ross
September 2, 2016 | The tranSMART Foundation has launched a free marketplace of service vendors for the tranSMART platform. The marketplace was developed by tranSMART as a way to localize the vast world of data research and the vendors who offer services within that field.
“The idea of the Marketplace is to provide a place where people who have services to offer—whether it’s custom programming, implementation, deployment, or database loading skills—can reach out to our community and offer these services to them,” says Rudy Potenzone, the VP of Marketing and Acting Chief Operating Officer at tranSMART.
The tranSMART Foundation is a non-profit organization that offers a free, open-source data platform for translational research. However, a lot of the individuals who use the platform are not able to fully access the product effectively, whether through a lack of funding or awareness of the market that provides the services required. Users look for vendors that offer services and products to help them use the tranSMART tool to its full potential. That’s where the newly launched tranSMART Marketplace comes in.
Potenzone believes that if there can be a centralized place where customers and vendors can reach one another directly, then this eliminates a process where a lot of contacts are lost or left undiscovered.
The setup is simple. The Marketplace has a directory of vendors that offer an array of services. Services are grouped into categories including Platform Provisioning, Training, and Custom Development. TranSMART customers can look at the vendors listed to find a match for their needs. The service is open to both members and non-members of tranSMART. All 20 of the current vendors provide tranSMART-related services, although these same vendors offer non-tranSMART services as well.
It’s perhaps best to think of the Marketplace as a dating website. TranSMART’s service allows customers and vendors to use the information provided to see if one is compatible with the other. This is something tranSMART and its committees have been talking about for a while; Potenzone says the committees have been noticing a lack of openness within the sciences regarding certain proprietary projects. He hopes the new service will encourage people to share their stories. “This Marketplace allows vendors to talk about what they did and brag about the success that they’ve had,” he says.
The concept of the Marketplace is not new, and companies have always relied on word-of-mouth recommendations. However, tranSMART hopes that their Marketplace will take the place of this, configuring the information once available here and there into a cohesive directory.
Of the 20 vendors already listed in the Marketplace, the ones who will benefit the most are the smaller vendors, whose strengths are geared toward a particular field that may not have as much pull as the bigger companies. They can point to their past success in their respective fields and on the new online service to boost their reputation among consumers.
TranSMART also benefits greatly from the service. The Foundation sees this as a useful marketing tool to expand its audience. “One of the goals of the foundation is to grow the utility of our software and the data sources across the community,” Potenzone stressed. “This is very much a community awareness thing.”
The Foundation hopes that this mode of networking can help them reach new users and continue to connect with users who currently use their software. Potenzone hopes that the Marketplace, “gets people interested in tranSMART in the sense that they start to see it as a place to go to get an idea of what kinds of things people are doing within the platform tranSMART has to offer.”
TranSMART is already thinking ahead to what else they can do to improve their new resource, and they are presently tossing around ideas that they hope to get running within the next 6 months. “It’s growing fast,” Potenzone says. “We’ve sent out invitations [to vendors to join the Marketplace], and we’ve already heard back from companies that we didn’t even know about.” The word is spreading and the marketplace is growing, which is exactly what tranSMART wants to see.