Medical Office Management Software - Network Effect for Business Continuity

A lot of times the problem with software that you install locally is once you go from, let's say, software X, from version five to version six, that's it. You can't go back to that old version. You can't try out the new version without going to the new version. And so if there are bugs or if you get stuck on the new version and you don't like some piece of it, there's really no choice, you just have to deal with it and find a way around it. What we've done is create a system whereby we could release pieces of our new release individually to subsets of our clients. When we release Vericle, the first thing that we want to do is test the system internally, make sure that all the components are working as planned. We try to take out as many bugs as possible during that process. But no release process is going to be perfect.

There's always going to be some bugs that escape our testing process. So, the next step is to take the system, the new version, and to roll it out into a beta site. The beta site is a restricted site. We hand the URL out only to a select group of users, practices that are going to use the beta site and try to vet out all the bugs. Once those doctors, once those offices have gone through that beta system and we've exterminated the bugs that are left in that beta version of the software, we can then roll it out to some of our client base. And we do a rolling release.

So we roll out a version to maybe 25% of our client base. Those clients now see the new version. They've already been told that there's a new version coming out, they can see the feature list, the release notes, and so on. And so the next step is for them to hit that new server, see the functionality, take some time to get used to it.

If there's something that they find that it's very difficult to use or they really need to get back to the old version, they do have that capability to just switch off back to the old version for a while, and then finally we'll release out the upgrade to the rest of the clients. And so by having these multiple versions running at the same time, we can make sure that clients don't get stuck with an older version. By having multiple versions really allows us to bypass all those problems and will allow very stable releases that clients will be happy with.