UCLA gets teeth into NZ software

By ADAM GIFFORD

Listed Auckland firm Software of Excellence has made its first sale into the North American market with the University of California, Los Angeles School of Dentistry buying its patient record system.

Software of Excellence was founded 12 years ago to focus on packaged software for dentists, dental schools and hospital and public health dental programmes. It dominates the market in New Zealand and has a solid foothold in Britain, where its clinical and administration programs are used by more than 1400 dental practices.

In Australia, it has done well with its Exact Enterprise product, which is used by the Adelaide dental school, public heath programmes in three states and community programs in the Australian Capital Territory.

Chief executive Paul Weatherly said the UCLA school ran its own dentistry services, as well as an outreach clinic at Venice Beach.

"It's switching the existing administration system from paper to an electronic patient record system. It's a huge undertaking," he said.

Historical records need to be not just reproduced but recollated, so information is not recorded multiple times. The system will be accessed by more than 500 workstations.

Software of Excellence's systems are built in C and C++ on its own database, and is also working on a version of Exact Enterprise for SQL Server.

"[Microsoft] Access is not powerful enough - our competitors use it and it's not good. SQL is expensive to license and look after, but we need to offer it as an option," Mr Weatherly said.

The company has 80 staff, 30 in New Zealand, including the design team, and offices in Australia, England and now Los Angeles.

An implementation for a single dentist and receptionist, with a couple of days training, costs about $10,000. Enterprise implementations cost in the hundred of thousands. The firm had turnover in the year to March 31 of $9.5 million, and expects to hit $15 million this year as its enterprise sales take off.

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