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Emerald doesn't really exist yet, and I believe they misrepresent their automation. They've posted a very pretty site with a bunch of mockups. They have a set of workflows that work for their internal antiviral research, but "Heroku for Science" is a completely different game.

Transcriptic, on the other hand, started taking orders six months ago and has customers at Stanford, Caltech, Harvard, and more.

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There are probably others much more familiar with cloud infrastructure who can chime in, but the AWS of science and the Heroku of science are two very different challenges, and I feel the analogies probably cross over pretty well.

Definitely having the infrastructure 'warehouse' layer that Transcriptic is building (with a real API! wow!) will be valuable. And like you hint at, power users won't need hand-holding, but 99% of the market of users will. That's where packaging, ease of use, and limited configuration seem to be the difference maker (Heroku starting exclusively with Rails).

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