Neil Otslund

According to Neil Otslund, President of Hypercube, "We've added ab initio technology into our base product because it is now a desktop-accessible technology that is useful for large numbers of chemists."

All these trends are making tools more uniform and more widely used -- and putting downward pressure on prices.

For a while, a number of vendors have combined information management and modeling tools.But a new type of tool is also evolving.