Vendor:Lab-Ally LLC

**Lab-Ally, LLC**
Type	Limited liability company
Industry	Laboratory informatics
Founder(s)	Rob Day
Headquarters	247 E. Ninth Ave., Columbus, Ohio, United States
Area served	Worldwide
Products	Products list CERF; ; RSpace;
Website	lab-ally.com; cerf-notebook.com
LinkedIn	https://www.linkedin.com/company/lab-ally-llc/

Lab-Ally, LLC develops and distributes enterprise laboratory informatics software solutions including CERF, RSpace, and eCAT. Lab-Ally also sells a number of other life science products and services, including the sourcing of difficult-to-find materials and samples, 21 CFR Part 11 data management, and recruitment.^[1]

History

Lab-Ally was formed in August 2013^[2] as a sales and marketing partner for a number of small biotech/histopathology companies. The founders were former employees of Rescentris, Inc., the company that originally developed the CERF ELN in the early 2000s.^[3] Rescentris (which was also briefly known as ELN Technologies and irisnote, Inc.) ceased operations following the unfortunate death of primary owner and advisory board member Leonard Herzenberg, an internationally renowned scientist at Stanford University.^[4]^[5]^[6]

In April 2014, support and development rights of CERF ELN passed back to Lab-Ally.^[7] Some minor maintenance and security releases were provided to existing CERF customers in 2014 and 2015^[8], and a new iPad client called "iCERF" was released in 2016.^[9]

Partnerships

In 2013, Lab-Ally formed a strategic partnership with ResearchSpace, the U.K.-based makers of the RSpace ELN and eCAT sample tracking system. Lab-Ally currently serves as the North American operating arm of ResearchSpace, assisting with all aspects of product design, support, distribution, and U.S. invoicing.^[10]

Technology and products

RSpace

RSpace is the successor of the older eCAT ELN product and was designed by the makers of eCAT with input from Lab-Ally. RSpace is intended mainly for large academic, government, and commercial enterprise deployments. RSpace uses any HTML5 capable browser to connect to the server and can be used with any workstation or any modern mobile device. RSpace is highly integrated with other common web tools and is designed to allow users to create links to data already stored in third-party systems like Box, Dropbox, MS OneDrive, Mendeley, GitHub and others. RSpace also includes integration with ORCID and allows export directly to archives like Figshare and Dataverse. A free public cloud version is available for use by academic labs. The RSpace server can be installed anywhere, but customers with limited IT expertise can choose to package RSpace with a private Amazon Web Services host instance managed by ResearchSpace.^[11]

For more about RSpace and eCAT, please see Research Innovations Limited.

CERF

CERF (Collaborative Electronic Research Framework)^[3] is an electronic laboratory notebook (ELN) with content management and scientific data management system (SDMS) capabilities, designed mainly for high compliance commercial labs.^[12] The system includes the CERF server and dedicated desktop client applications for Mac OS and Windows. The system does not depend on internet access and can be run on a totally secure private LAN. CERF includes semantic metadata tagging and semantic search technologies, in-line data viewing, secure round-trip editing of any file type, versioned document control, true PKI digital signatures, and a dedicated app for the iPad platform called iCERF. CERF can be installed either on-premise or on a cloud server of the user's choice.^[12] In January 2017, Lab-Ally released CERF ELN version 5.0. ^[13]

Features

The following feature list(s) is/are derived solely from public, freely-available online information the vendor provides. A lack of a "Y" does not necessarily mean that the product doesn't have that feature. The lack of a "Y" could mean:

the vendor chose to not put relevant feature information online despite its existence in the product.
the vendor chooses to make the feature information available only to those who create an account or call/e-mail.
the feature information exists online to the public, but a URL could not be found to cite the existence of the feature.
the feature does not exist for the product.

A vendor's product may receive more confirmed features with the addition of more public information to the vendor's site and/or by providing a URL to a page or document that can act as a citation for the existence of the feature. Prospective buyers are highly recommended to contact the vendor directly to verify features as this list isn't authoritative, and product upgrades and changes happen rapidly in some cases.

Product: CERF

Experiment, collaboration, and data management
Chemical and/or mathematical drawing and calculation?
Chemical and/or spectrum file support?
Task and event scheduling?
Option for manual result entry?
Multiple data viewing methods?
Data and trend analysis?	Y^[14]
Data and equipment sharing?	Y^[12]
Customizable fields and/or interface?	Y^[14]
Configurable templates and forms?	Y^[14]
Query capability?	Y^[14]
Import data?	Y^[12]
Internal file or data linking?	Y^[14]
External file or data linking?
Export data to MS Excel?
Raw data management?	Y^[14]
Data warehouse?	Y^[12]
Project and/or task management?	Y^[14]
Inventory management?	Y^[14]
Document creation and/or management?	Y^[12]
Lab and/or group management?	Y^[14]
Experiment management?	Y^[14]
Workflow management?
Customer and supplier management?
Quality, security, and compliance
Regulatory compliance?	Y^[12]
QA / QC functions?
Performance evaluation?
Audit trail?	Y^[14]
Chain of custody?
Configurable roles and security?	Y^[14]
Data normalization?
Data validation?
Data encryption?
Electronic signatures?	Y^[12]
Version control?	Y^[14]
Automatic data backup?
Reporting, barcoding, and printing
Custom reporting?	Y^[14]
Report printing?	Y^[14]
Label support?
Barcode support?
Export to PDF?
Export to MS Word?
Export to HTML and/or XML?
Email integration?	Y^[14]
Base functionality
Administrator management?	Y^[12]
Modular?	Y^[14]
Instrument interfacing and management?	Y^[14]
Mobile device integration?	Y^[12]
Third-party software integration?	Y^[14]
Alarms and/or alerts?
External monitoring?	Y^[14]
Messaging?
Bookmarking?	Y^[14]
Commenting?
Multilingual?
Network-capable?	Y^[12]
Web client or portal?	Y^[12]
Online or integrated help?	Y^[12]
Software as a service delivery model?	Y^[12]
Usage-based cost?
Industries served
biotechnology, life sciences, pharmaceutical