So, over the last few weeks both me and Carlos have blogged extensively about the past and about how Mestrelab came to be and to grow into what it is today. But of course, although 5 years looks like a long time when you think about it, it really is not, and specially for a company, and therefore we are now staring at the next 5, and hopefully 10, 20, 50 years (not me personally for the latter, mind). We have many options, and many ideas, possible business models, potential projects, and it is of course hard to make decisions and to give up some of these to make the others possible. And we should not only do what we think is best, but we should listen to our loyal customers and find out what it is that they would like us to do, and the business offers they would support from our company.

We have a great, young and enthusiastic team of people with a wide range of skills in the scientific software field, and with the capability to learn fast and to take new projects on. We also now have a very exciting network of likeminded collaborators who allow us to stretch our development efforts far beyond our internal capabilities. And we have the desire to continue to expand our offer and to continue to fulfil our customers’ needs. These are all great assets to fuel future growth.

However, there are some things we really not want to do. We don’t want to compromise with the quality of our product because of overstretching it, we don’t want to reduce the quality of our customer service because of cost reductions or delocalizations (don’t you love these words!). And we don’t want to stop having fun while we work on a field we find, to many people’s surprise, very exciting!

There are some things we know we want to do, or which we are already starting to do:

• We want to continue to improve the capabilities of our software to handle and analyze different experiments and to support different applications, and we are always open to hearing about new or different things our users would like to do with the software. Write to us with new applications and feature requests in our current fields and we will consider them.
• We want to continue to build the LC/GC/MS plugin as a complimentary plugin to the NMR one, but also as a high quality software application in its own right, focused on user workflow.
• We want to push the potential of our processing and analysis capabilities in the area of automatic structure determination (Verification). We are making very good progress in this area with the help of the ineffable Stan Sykora, and we are very excited about the announcements we are likely (or hopeful) to be making in the near future. Watch this space, and let us know if you would like us to keep you posted on progress here!
• We want to combine the information obtained by NMR and LC/MS or GC/MS on this automatic structure determination effort, to gain as much reliability as possible.
• In order to continue to follow the Mnova ‘integrated software suite for handling of analytical data’ concept, we think that including databasing capabilities in Mnova will add great value to our users, and are therefore creating a database environment to handle analytical data using Mnova as the client to drive saving, indexing and searching. We are very keen to hear from users who would be interested in such databasing capabilities, and to know about the main needs/features/applications people have in mind for such a tool. Please write to us if you would like to know (or would like us to know) more.
• There are many things we could do, and it would be great to hear about what you, our users, think we should be focusing on. We see many possibilities in molecular structure handling and storing, in automatic management of analytical data, in plugins for the computation of additional physical properties, in processing and analysis of data coming from additional techniques, etc. The flexibility of the Mnova interface should allow us to integrate many of these capabilities without compromising the integrity of Mnova as a single software package, and this is exciting and something we would like to exploit for the benefit of the Chemistry and Biology communities. We also want to know if you think there are any third party softwares we should be integrating closely with (LIMS and pipeline management systems, etc.). Finally, we are very keen to hear about how you feel we may improve our customer service, become more accessible to our users and which conferences and events we should make sure we support in our annual calendar.

So, this is your chance to make sure our company continues to go the way you would like it to for the next 5 years. We very much look forward to hearing from you! (Use the comments of this post, our email support[at]mestrec.com or the contact form at our web page.)

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