BioExcel Deliverable D5.3 – Updated business plan

This is the third iteration of our business plan. It reflects the progress of the sustainability planning and the commercial intentions of the consortium as of April 2018. Section one gives a brief presentation of our mission and our sustainability goals, followed by a description of the biomolecular researchers that we regard as our main users and potential clients. In section two, we estimate the size of our current academic user community to be at least 15.000 active users. We provide findings from surveys among academic and industrial users, showing that usability aspects and compatibility of software are major concerns. We further present data from HPC market studies, based on which we estimate that the European market for biomolecular HPC software has a size of ca €170 million in 2018. In section three we present the business model canvas for the BioExcel CoE, that will be discussed in greater detail throughout the following sections. Section four shows our value proposition that consists of support for the development of software & workflows, provision of demonstrators, as well as support aimed at increasing the competency of researchers using biomolecular software. We discuss our commercial offerings in section five, where we have the intention to develop online training and workflow-related services/products. The product definition is still in progress, with prototyping, provision of demonstrators and product testing in focus groups to be done during the remaining months. The goal is to have the first prototyped offerings in place by the end of this project. The marketing strategy is discussed in section six, mentioning online and offline channels that we are using, such as e.g. Twitter or networking events. We also present our sales efforts that include usage of a CRM tool to follow the progress on our leads. Aspects of intellectual property are discussed in section 7, foremost touching on the license situation of our codes. The conclusion is that we can use the BioExcel-supported software in commercial settings. In section eight we present the envisioned BioExcel structure, which will consist of a consortium and a social enterprise. The social enterprise will be our single interface for commercial activities, while the consortium will work on academic aspects that are financed through public grants. The financial management is touched-on in section nine, showing that we will have three types of revenue to fund software development and provision of user support. Where appropriate, sections conclude with action points, indicating next steps and the corresponding timelines