I'm curious what this will do to disrupt the efforts of companies offering tests using the current array of DNA sequencing technologies (which are probably mostly Illumina Hi-Seqs and MiSeqs).
This piece of equipment seems like it cuts out a lot of the pain of those technologies: massive data output, requirement of expensive compute resources, a team of bioinformaticians, etc.
As far as I could understand it's only finding common SNPs, so it will do nothing really to compete with Hiseq or Miseq which are doing a compeletely different thing. However I find the technology inside pretty fascinating nonetheless - 30 PCR cycles in 9 minutes all on a chip smaller than a business card seems extremely cool to me (but then I'm a bioinformatician - I get excited when I see a pipette).
I think this cuts out the pain more on the lab side. Note that this is a SNP array, not a sequencer. Current-gen SNP array output is already relatively painless to work with (depending on manufacturer, I assume - Affymetrix 6.0 arrays were pretty easy).
But this technology appears to automate a lot of the lab side: restriction enzymes to chop it up, PCR to amplify, etc., which is also applicable to sequencing.
Not much in the short term. This sort of thing still isn't really suited to the sort of industrialized testing most commercial labs are undertaking. Maybe when the price comes down enough or they're reusable in arrays it might have more of an effect, but at the moment it's still more reasonable to hire a few entry-level people to perform DNA extraction and PCR.
This piece of equipment seems like it cuts out a lot of the pain of those technologies: massive data output, requirement of expensive compute resources, a team of bioinformaticians, etc.