An introduction to our technology

When Geoff and I started Audiology Engine we talked at length about what systems and services we wanted to offer to audiology practices and what tools we would need to be able to do that. It quickly became clear that off-the-shelf products like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal would not fit the bill; whilst they are all great pieces of software in their own right, they soon become cumbersome when you try and use them for something that we weren’t originally intended to do. We knew we didn’t want to just deliver generic websites, we wanted to deliver something that fits perfectly to the needs of a modern practice.

So we’ve built a system from scratch and kept the following goals in mind:

1. Provide high-quality websites to practices.

2. Provide online tools so that practices can reach both potential and existing customers through their website, emails and social media.

3. Provide practice management software.

We feel that we’ve already got #1 covered and are making good strides with #2. We hope to debut #3 sometime early in 2015.

The somewhat geeky bit

Our software is built entirely in Java, it’s a programming language favoured by large businesses for it’s speed, scalability and stability – and besides, I’ve been building things in Java for many years so it made sense to stick to what I know. Our Java code runs on Apache Tomcat instances.

We use Ubuntu servers in various locations around the world. Ubuntu is a hugely-popular Linux distribution that is secure and robust.

Locations

We have several servers dotted around the world. We currently have a server running in San Francisco, which runs the websites of our East Coast/mid-US customers and two in London for our UK and Ireland based customers. We will be adding New York in the new year.

We have multiple locations because it means we can serve a practice’s website as quickly as possible – practices will have fairly local customer-bases so it doesn’t make sense for a potential customer for a practice in California to have to wait that little bit longer to view a webpage coming from a server in London. There’s not a huge difference in website-loading time by putting the server locally to the practice, maybe a couple of seconds, but many studies have shown that people don’t like to wait for a website to load and are likely to go elsewhere if they have to wait too long, so that two seconds can make the difference between someone setting foot in your practice and them going elsewhere.

Owning it

I strongly believe that because we’ve built our own system from the ground-up we are able to deliver new features and improvements to all our customers quickly and with the minimum of disruption to a practice. I believe it also means that the system we deliver is much more suited to the needs of a modern practice and the practice is not “just another WordPress site”.

Updates

We are working all the time to improve Audiology Engine and we usually make new releases live to customers every two weeks, I will be updating this blog after each release to give you some idea of what new features and improvements have been added.

Demo

Want to know more? Get in touch with us if you’d like a demonstration of Audiology Engine or want to know more.