Central Plains Eye MDs - a VM6 Customer Profile
I had an opportunity to communicate with a VM6 customer, John Pedersen, Practice Manager at Central Plains Eye MDs. I find that hearing from people using a company's technology really interesting and I thought you would too.
Please introduce yourself and your company
The goal of Central Plains Eye MDs is to bring the best sub-specialty ophthalmic care available to our region. Although the company is just under three years old, our medical staff has provided more than 18 years of experience providing exemplary local service to patients of all ages and to referring doctors. We emphasize the full spectrum of diabetic eye pathology, retinal detachment repair, age-related macular disease, management of macular hole and pucker, retinal vascular problems and ocular trauma management.What are you doing that needed VM6 Software’s technology?
The founding doctor wanted his new business to be a best-in-class, agile small business. The business needed to virtualize its desktops and incorporate high availability and disaster recovery, but minimize the total cost of ownership at startup. I had followed the evolution of Citrix, VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V, but I didn’t have a lot of time to research and implement the technology. We needed a partner that would deliver superior technology options and support us along the learning curve.We started calling around and talking to the consulting companies, but as soon as they heard we were an SMB with only 10 employees, they weren’t interested in working with us. Most said that no one provides a cost-effective technology for the small business, but I knew enough about the advantages of virtualization in the enterprise environment to persist.
The rapidly evolving regulations requiring moving to electronic health records really required us to persist. At first, I tried desktop virtualization with terminal services and did nothing on the back end. Although successful from a cost of ownership standpoint, it didn’t address the server capacity issue that was being rapidly depleted. We expanded from 12 original thin clients to 25 clients with an exponential increase in high-resolution images, and I was running out of server capacity, so I started messing with Hyper-V, but that didn’t answer our high availability need. The doctors cannot have anything going down at any time. When you talk about high availability, you generally only see that in enterprise class systems, but we needed it here.