Merck Acquires BSSN Software to Accelerate Customers’ Digital Transformation in the Lab

• Gives scientists better, more efficient access to their lab data
• Boosts Merck’s digital laboratory productivity business, commercial growth

Darmstadt, Germany, August 6, 2019 — Merck, a leading science and technology company, has acquired BSSN Software, a Darmstadt, Germany-based laboratory informatics company that makes data more readily accessible for ease of integration, collaboration, analysis and long-term archiving. Financial details were not disclosed.

“BSSN Software and the capabilities that it brings will allow Merck’s customers to better use and share their scientific data — the most important part of laboratory experiments,” said Jean-Charles Wirth, head of Applied Solutions at the Life Science business sector of Merck. “We acquired this company for commercial growth of the lab data management technology that BSSN provided for many years. This acquisition creates opportunity and gives Merck a unique position in this fast-paced market.”

BSSN Software is known for developing and marketing data management and integration software that unifies data from instruments and data systems and makes them available for analyzing, processing and sharing. It collects and converts scientific data from a broad range of more than 200 lab instrument models into a single, unified format. As a middleware offering, it facilitates communication and data flow between instruments and systems, such as laboratory information management systems, electronic lab notebooks and enterprise resource planning systems. The acquisition complements Merck’s efforts to support its customers’ digital transformation in the lab.

Since 2014, Merck has been working with BSSN Software, which primarily served pharmaceutical and food and beverage customers and provided services to facilitate standard laboratory efforts. BSSN Software was the first company to introduce to the market a complete AnIML implementation, an open standardized XML data format for storing and sharing of experiment data. With this acquisition, Merck is combining BSSN’s technology with its market access and laboratory domain knowledge to develop and commercialize an open and interoperable platform for laboratory data.

Merck is committed to the continued development and support of the current BSSN Software product portfolio, its customers and partnerships, as well as an open ecosystem building on the AnIML standard and Standardization in Lab Automation.

BSSN’s employees have joined Merck as part of its Applied Digital Lab Productivity Solutions team.

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