Well it’s the last day of work before the holidays. I am looking forward to spending time with my family over the break.
2012 has been a busy year.
I put together a new management team. Toni Skokovich joined us from Merge Healthcare to fulfil the role of VP of Sales. Matt Liness came from Alpha IT to become our VP of Professional Services. Both Toni and Matt had seen at first hand what the translator could offer and how much of a step forward it is over conventional integration engines. They liked the product so much, they joined the company :-).
It’s one thing to have a good product – but to make a difference, you really need a great business team to back it up and sell it. Together with Art Harrison who still leads our marketing team, that’s exactly what has happened. We’re on track to grow our sales by 40% this year. That’s a big vote of confidence from the market in what we are doing.
Development has seen some big changes this year. We’ve set up a new branch office in Kitchener, Waterloo. Kevin Senn was promoted to head up the development team there. He’s put together a great young energetic team who is passionate about the ongoing evolution of Iguana.
We’ve been experimenting with our own user forum in Linked In – The Community of Iguana users. I’ve enjoyed being able to interact more directly with our users. I think it’s been really helpful in getting some good ideas flowing. We recently came up with a module for parsing PDFs and sending mail attachments with the translator as a result of those discussions. Next year, we’ll be going live with our own forum system as part of our website. We are hoping to be able to build a community that will promote creativity in solving everyday problems.
Interesting changes are happening within the standards community. I dropped a bit of a bomb into the world wide HL7 community with my blog on the Rise and Fall of HL7. My article really just gave a very public voice to what many people were saying quietly. There has been some positive impact which looks promising. The new FHIR standard that HL7 is working on spear headed by Grahame Grieve is embracing the concepts of simplification and RESTful APIs for healthcare data. I am interested to see where it leads.
The confidence that I have in the management team has enabled me to take a step away from daily sales and operations and get back into R&D. I’ve been exploring the next evolutionary step in building integration engines. I have a vision. I think we are just scratching the surface of what can be done with integration technology. To get to where I want to go will take another non-incremental jump just like the translator. Large-scale innovation takes time but it’s exciting to make it happen.
On a personal level, this year has not been without its share of ups and downs. My mother finally succumbed to cancer on the 12th of September. It was a long battle for her – I was back in New Zealand for two long trips this year. I am grateful for being able to remain by her side. I am very thankful to my wife and family for all the support they gave me during this time.
Death is an uncomfortable part of reality. We need to move on with our lives and it’s a reminder to make sure you believe in what you do.
I feel very fortunate to have the opportunity to be able to do what I do. It’s a privilege to be able to work on bringing innovation to life. It’s not something that could happen without the support of a great team at iNTERFACEWARE and the loyal support we have from our user community.
Without you all it wouldn’t be possible to bring a product like Iguana to market.
Thank you! I hope everyone has a good holiday period and gets the opportunity to spend time with friends and family.
All the best!
Eliot Muir
P.S. Thanks to Behrang Farzan for editing the grammer of this blog at the 11th hour … 😉