Newsletter: November 2005
Eliot Muir Speaks at Rotman Business School
iNTERFACEWARE's President and Founder, Eliot Muir, was invited to speak at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management on November 1st. Muir spoke in front of a packed auditorium at the business school, educating the audience about iNTERFACEWARE and the HL7 tools market.
The HL7 standard is the definitive protocol for exchanging data in the healthcare industry. This has led to the continual growth of the market for HL7 tools to support the protocol. Muir told the audience that in the beginning, the market was lacking in tools that could be seen as cost-effective solutions. iNTERFACEWARE changed all of that with the development of Chameleon, a cost-effective HL7 software toolkit. This toolkit enables users to embed highly configurable HL7 messaging functionality directly into their application code. A change to the HL7 mapping does not always require changes to application code. Chameleon has remained to this day a very attractive solution for programmers and has significant HL7 market share.
"iNTERFACEWARE can attribute much of its early success to being market-focused from the company's inception", said Muir. "When iNTERFACEWARE developed Chameleon, it was with the intent of providing the market with an effective means of leveraging HL7 technology, to solve real and practical business problems."
iNTERFACEWARE has now developed Iguana, an intuitive standalone HL7 to/from database interface engine. Iguana empowers hospital IT managers, interface architects and database administrators to solve real HL7 business problems with little or no programming. Iguana has received positive feedback from the market and has expanded the realm of HL7 possibilities for iNTERFACEWARE's customers, resulting in a dramatic expansion of its overall customer base.
"The key to a successful business is to always understand your market and meet its needs", said Muir. "iNTERFACEWARE's goal is to provide its customers with user-friendly tools, which make HL7 easy and allow people to solve integration problems. Basically, we want to provide tools which enable customers to take ownership of their HL7."
To sum up his speech, Muir told the business school audience that there are simple rules a business should follow to be successful.
"If you understand your market and completely meet its needs, you will undoubtedly enjoy success", said Muir. "Customers are drawn to companies who build and support total business solutions from day one. iNTERFACEWARE has done that for almost a decade and will continue to do that for many years to come."