ISA Technologies, the company that invested $5 million in a supercomputer in 2003, is providing access to that infrastructure, free of charge, to what it calls a group of trusted participants.
There’s no memorandum of understandings, no licensing deals, and no formal agreements to speak of.
Rather, ISA Technologies managing director Sil La Puma told WA Business News the arrangement was a true knowledge-based community.
“The government comes up with the buzz word of knowledge-based economy, but what we are actually doing is implementing it,” Mr La Puma said.
He said the traditional model of a university undertaking R&D and then seeking industry partners was flawed because universities did not have the commercial expertise or drivers that were found in private companies.
“Most of the investment is in establishing relationships, so once the testing is completed you start all over again. So what ISA is doing is bringing together a strategic community, which has trusted partnering relationships whether with a vendor, university, or industry players,” Mr La Puma told WA Business News.
“They can bring skills to us that can leverage our capabilities.
“When they get the results and they get a commercial edge we will then provide services on a commercial basis.”
ISA director, and former Curtin University deputy vice-chancellor of research and development, Paul Rossiter, said researchers from Curtin and Murdoch universities were using the supercomputer at no charge.
“This can help researchers get into a space they weren’t at before and expand what they do,” he said.
Mr Rossiter said research develo-ped could then be used by various parties.
“The problem in Australia is the truly transactional approach, doing a deal and getting a return. What struck me when I went to America is that they build trusted relationships and everything builds around it. They don’t do disclosure agreements so that it’s a trusted community and people put things on the table,” he said.
“We’ve said, let’s not worry about IP, let’s see if you have the right team.
“We’re building a community of knowledge. We can see that potential of Igor Bray [Murdoch researcher] and people at Curtin. They have the skills base that we don’t have and when we put it together it’s like putting two and two together and it makes five.”
The team at ISA can then develop ideas generated from collaboration to commercialise products such as the work it’s undertaking in virtualisation, according to Mr La Puma.
ISA recently won an R&D contract from IBM for visualisation research. A $300,000 visual lab will soon be installed to work in tandem with the supercomputer to develop imaging technology.
ISA is also involved in collabo-rative research with industry and Curtin’s Centre for Marine Science and Technology to provide super-computing solutions to hydrody-namic problems faced by maritime industries.
ISA, which develops a range of information management systems, is also selling supercomputer usage to clients wanting to hasten processing time without spending a fortune on the infrastructure.
“What we want to deliver is a service using on-demand where people plug into us. For instance, a customer of ours in oil and gas that needs to process data might take six months, but with our processing we can do it four times faster,” Mr La Puma said.
“People can pay for that performance time and when the processing is finished then they don’t continue to pay.”