As readers of the Visioneer know, Veeda Software, LLC had a phenomenal year in 2007 growing at over 100% from the prior year. What we could not tell anyone was the major source of that growth. We could only say that it was due to “some large client” who did not want us to reveal their name until after our software was deployed. We can tell you now that this client is eClinicalWorks (eCW) of Westborough, MA.

eClinicalWorks is a market leader of Electronic Medical Records (EMR)/Practice Management (PM) software. They rank number 34 on Inc. Magazine’s listing of the 5,000 fastest growing private companies in America. And, amongst software companies they rank number 4. Their software product is extremely scalable. Therefore a small medical practice of just a few doctors can use it as can the City of New York’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. In fact, the eCW EMR system is the cornerstone of the city’s prevention-oriented record keeping.

How is Veeda Being Used?

The company had been making some use of Fax broadcasting on a small scale. They had integrated their software with industry leaders like eFax.com and MyFax.com. Yet, that solution had various incremental costs. Their smaller clients couldn’t afford it and were left with the option of using generic Fax modems installed in each user site. eClinicalWorks was looking for something beyond fax modems, which is why they chose Veeda.

Chief among many other reasons, eClinicalWorks’ desire to get the new features to market as soon as possible drove their decision to use Veeda Software. After going through the process of analyzing the market for fax boards, they narrowed their search down to two vendors. One of those vendors mentioned the name Veeda Software as a trusted source for custom telephony software development.

In our proposal to eCW we suggested that they break the projects down into three phases. Phase I was established to implement a new experimental system capable of handling inbound and outbound Fax communications. This would allow us to become familiar with the eCW system and for them to get comfortable with Veeda. Phase II was designed to be a complete Fax communications system built upon the lessons from Phase I, adding a backbone framework for building the entire fax infrastructure.

The rollout of this project is well under way as you read this newsletter. What lessons did we learn? Ordered growth works, and our tools and techniques proved to be the difference maker yet again. We are using our philosophy of “ordered growth” in our contracts just like we use it to grow Veeda Software.

The last few months have been great for all of us here at Veeda Software. But more importantly, they have been greater for our customers and partners as well. In the months since our last newsletter, a large client of ours, eClinicalWorks has successfully deployed the first of what we hope will be many solutions developed by our team. In true Veeda fashion, we have been creating various software “building blocks” and putting them together to produce a solid solution for eCW. Many of these building blocks are derivations of our own internal tools and techniques. We were happy to see our tools and techniques helping reduce eClinicalWork’s time to market with their new fax server software module, the newest addition to their Electronic Medical Records (EMR) package. You can read more about this story in the “We Can Tell it Now” article.

It already looks like we are on track to meet our initial expectations set in our board meeting last December. In line with our marketing plan for 2008, we have retained a marketing consultant to help us better project the image of Veeda Software, LLC to the rest of the world. We are the first to recognize that we are still a small firm and the world still needs to know who we are. John Leone of Wakefield, MA will be responsible for changing this picture.

One of the first actions directed by our marketing plan was to meet with each one of our partners. We met with them earlier this year. From knowledge we gathered in these meetings Veeda Software is shaping the marketing strategy for this year. We plan to be very active in working with our partners and their user communities to find ways that we can help them and their customers deliver better solutions.

As a result of one of the meetings we had with our partner Aculab, we have been invited to make a presentation on the Future of Fax in the VoIP Age, the T.38 protocol. I will be making this presentation at the Aculab Communications Exchange (ACE) conference on April 1st. Our portion of the session will be a mix of the technical details and the business opportunities of Fax Over IP. If you’re interested to know more about this session or the ACE event, you can visit their site: https://www.aculab.com/partners/ace_2008/scottsdale.htm.

We are very excited about this event. We are looking forward to more opportunities to share our knowledge and experience with our partner’s communities in the future as in this session at ACE. The road ahead is shaping up to be an exciting journey.

We have often been asked: “How do you expect to solve our problem if you have never experienced this exact issue before?” The implication is clear. “We cannot retain Veeda Software since you have no past track record of facing our exact issue.” The purpose of this article is to explain in simple terms how we address every prospective software development opportunity. First, and by far the most important point, is that we will not engage in any project that we feel we lack the innate skills to do what we propose to do. This is a matter of integrity and we place tremendous value on our honor and reputation. When Veeda delivers a proposal for software development, we are guaranteeing that it will work as designed. This means we are not only concerned with our success, but the success of our client. They have put their faith in us and they will not be disappointed.

Second, we are specialists in “low level” code. While it may not be obvious to casual observation, there is a common thread running through almost all of our work. Veeda has much experience working at the hardware control level. Recent examples include telephony boards, camera boards, or boards from durable medical equipment. Where we differentiate ourselves from “pure low-level coders” is that our solutions usually include User Interface components that need to meet specific standards of usability. This breadth of experience still surprises many people. Some years ago, before the foundation of Veeda Software, LLC, one of the principals of our company got to work on a job sold by his boss to a company aspiring to build FDC-approved medical equipment. The client was working on a data display interface for a headset he was rushing to market. Even though the project manager had his doubts that we could master the low level device, he felt he had no choice and issued the contract.

When the job was completed with working software, on time and on budget, that same man stood in awe. He was astounded as to how fast we had learned his product and other hardware toolkits. How could we have been able to master all that in time to deliver the first prototypes within their client’s timeframe?. This was all possible because we are not just programmers, but computer scientists. We all have years of experience working at the hardware level with both manufacturers toolkits or even working with the raw hardware. When you work at this level, computer hardware begins to look the same across a wide variety of end uses. Things like signal propagation and change of state are common to every electronic device. More times than not we can reduce the problem to one that we have seen before and use off-the-shelf solutions. This brings us to our next point.

The third reason we can do what others struggle with is that we bank the knowledge. Every time we develop a new tool or technique we document it rigorously. This is not only for the benefit of our client, but for our own staff too. Veeda recognizes that in order to grow, we need to train our new people on what our founders have learned. We require our people to take careful notes as they design and develop software so as to increase the knowledge base of our company. This gives us a vast reservoir of stored tools and techniques that we can call upon for any new job.

A small example of how this works is in order at this point. The founders of Veeda Software have had years of experience with telephony boards. At some point a few years back one of our clients decided to switch their telephony hardware supplier for a new service they wanted to offer. We had never before worked with the newly chosen board. Not only was this board from a different manufacturer with their own proprietary Software Development Kit (SDK), this SDK used a completely different programming paradigm. The previous board’s SDK programming was fully synchronous while the new one’s was asynchronous. So here was a new application using hardware we had never seen before from a supplier with whom we had no experience! What we did have was our tools and techniques. It turns out that the similarities in telephone call handling far outweighed the programming paradigm shift. We were able to use our previous experience in low-level device driver development to solve the same challenges we were facing in this project. The new SDK, while fundamentally very different, had the same functionality as the previous SDK. As a result we were able to adapt our own tools to the new SDK and obtain dramatic success. A technical representative from the hardware manufacturer said of Veeda: “I have never seen anyone pick up our SDK and develop an application faster than you guys!”