Business Plan

Products & Services Description

KRIangle.pngThe European Theoretical Spectroscopy Facility provides open-source software codes, background knowledge, customized support, training, and collaborators to acquire fundamental knowledge of matter at the quantum-mechanical level and to transfer this detailed understanding to the future design of groundbreaking technologies in areas such as photovoltaics, light emitting diodes, optical data storage, nanoelectronics, and chemical and biological processes.

Marketing

The ETSF is dedicated to providing support and services for research in industrial, governmental, and academic laboratories. Any organization that has a need for knowledge of physical or chemical properties of electronic materials, chemical or biological processes, or nanoelectronics is an initial target market for the ETSF.

Market Size

FEMAPHOTObyBKoplitz.jpgTo date, the ETSF has received over 150 proposals for projects and has more than 1000 users of ETSF software. The size of the potential market for the ETSF is enormous, as most companies could profit from an increased understanding of materials, chemical, or biological properties and processes, and there are a large number of experimental researchers at both governmental and academic laboratories who could benefit from ETSF theoretical collaborations and open-source software training on ETSF software codes. ETSF research topics are innumerable and varied. For example, the ETSF has already tackled projects in areas in biological markers for medicine, new materials for solar cells, nanoelectronics, optical data storage, rewritable DVDs, and light emitting diodes.

Market Strategy

We offer contract services to commercial companies. We are currently funded by an European Union (EU) e-Infrastructure grant and continue to try to attract further EU funding. The ETSF is actively seeking to form alliances with large experimental facilities/resources to enable us to offer a complete package of theoretical plus experimental resource support to our customers.

Strategic Alliances

The ETSF is forming a partnership with the SOLEIL synchrotron light source in Paris serving thousands of customers in areas such as materials science, chemistry, physics of materials, nanoelectronics, life sciences, and environmental sciences. We are also looking to partner with facilities such as high performance computing centers to create a framework for deploying the ETSF infrastructure to a much wider range of users, through user training and projects supported by ETSF scientists. Under the current ETSF e-Infrastructure grant, the ETSF is partnering with the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre and is forming a partnership with the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre.

Finances

Logo-e-Infrastructure_M.pngThe ETSF is currently funded by a 3.8 million euro European Union e-infrastructure grant. Additionally, approximately 200 scientists across Europe and the United States contribute their time to the operation of the ETSF. The income to meet ETSF activity comes from various sources: to a significant extent from participating institutions, from regional and national sources, from the EU Framework Programme, and more and more through income directly from private foundations and industrial users of the ETSF (together with sponsorship).

The ETSF has seen major growth between 2008 and 2009 with a 10 percent growth in the contribution from participating institutions and strong growth in EU contributions. We expect continued growth in 2010 but at a lower level from these two sources, 5 percent growth for contributions from the ETSF institutions, and we expect the EU contributions to stabilize. The contribution from ETSF nodes will reach a plateau as the ETSF reaches its full size and becomes more successful in attracting companies and other paying users, probably around 2013.

How Does One Work With the ETSF?

If you believe that the ETSF may be useful to your enterprise, please do not hesitate to contact any of the Managerial or Scientific Officers. We are always looking to adapt our software to new customers and new technologies.

Complete Business Plan