Dell’s New Cloud Computing Buy
By Sourya Biswas of CloudTweaks
Having already made several acquisitions in the cloud computing space this year, Dell took another step in that direction when it announced on Wednesday, 29 December 2010, its intention to buy medical archive services company InSite One Inc. Terms of the transaction, which is subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed.
InSite One is a private company based in Wallingford, Connecticut, with about 40 employees. It offers cloud-based healthcare applications that archive medical records and share images. Its offerings will be complementary to Dell’s Unified Clinical Archive service.The combination will simplify data retention and let medical professionals access and share images regardless of the technology employed.
“Our customers have told us that managing the growing demands of both digital images and patient records is one of their greatest concerns,” said James Coffin, vice president of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences. “We are dramatically simplifying archiving and retention of clinical data, both medical images and electronic medical records. This will allow our customers to improve care and support medical innovation through the efficient use of IT, and we’re doing it in a way that actually simplifies access to the information when it’s needed by clinicians.”
“As the first company to bring cloud technology to the medical archive space, InSite One will help Dell’s healthcare customers take advantage of the economics and scalability of the cloud for medical archiving and retention,” said Berk Smith, vice president of Dell Healthcare and Life Sciences Services. “And looking beyond archiving, the cloud will also be a valuable tool for information exchange which is foundational to the transformation of healthcare.”
InSite claims to manage nearly 55 million clinical documents and more than 3.6 billion medical images, beside supporting almost 800 clinical sites. InSite’s cloud archival service supports all brands of picture archiving and communications systems (PACS) and data sources. InSite’s service also allows clinicians to access radiological images online and provides rapid indexing and sharing of data across different systems
“The InSite One team is thrilled to be joining the Dell team,” said Jim Champagne, CEO of InSite One. “As the industry’s leading provider of healthcare IT services, Dell will give InSite One an opportunity to reach more customers and expand our impact on the healthcare industry.”
This development is not unexpected, especially since the company had earlier announced its intention to invest in data centre hardware, software and services for private cloud computing systems.
