Now that I’m back and well rested from the whirlwind of HIMSS, I wanted to share some of what I personally experienced at the conference.
Firstly, I was quite taken aback by the overwhelmingly positive response that our new approach to integration received. The unveiling of the Iguana Translator platform was a great success! Out of over 500 people who visited our booth, I can count the number of people who didn’t like our new approach on one hand.
I had a lot of interesting conversations at the show.
I spoke with an integration engineer from Chicago, who had worked with Cloverleaf. She explained to me how her team found that they had much better maintainability and ease of development when they kept to the TCL scripting side of the engine rather than utilizing the graphical mapper. She expressed excitement about the concept of being able to see what code is doing as it’s being written as well as modifying interfaces from within a web browser.
I also had the opportunity to give my two cents on where Mirth fits into the whole integration ecosystem. Personally, I feel that Mirth has been a positive development within healthcare integration by helping many more people to grasp not only the concept of an integration engine but also the value of one.
A number of start-ups discussed the problem of a large increase in demand for their solutions and expressed frustration at being ill equipped to handle the volume of implementations. Nothing extinguishes enthusiasm faster than telling your customer they need to wait two years because your implementation takes a month and you’ve got 20 orders waiting.
Possibly the most encouraging conversations that I had were with people who would never refer to themselves as ‘coders’ but who found the approach of the translator intuitive. The ease of navigating from a message into the mapping screen with just a few mouse clicks was particularly well received. The strong validation from this portion of the integration community spoke volumes as an endorsement of the direction of our products and our company as a whole.
These conversations were reaffirming. I had always recognized the intelligence of our audience. Our market is full of talented people who fully understand the practical challenges that have to be overcome. People are not naive. They want to work with a company that acknowledges the need for tools to be more productive instead of ones that are built on marketing messages with empty promises.
If you would like to learn more about the thought process that I went through when designing the early prototypes of the Iguana Translator, I invite you to read my blog series entitled, “The Brave New World of Middleware”.
Eliot Muir
President and CEO, iNTERFACEWARE™
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