Corridor tech companies work to stay ahead of the curve

CEDAR RAPIDS — With technology seeming to move at light speed, and regulations for health care facilities continuing to grow ever more complex, software and website developers in Corridor have to evolve to find new ways to keep in front of what their clients — current and future — will need.

Cedar Rapids-based Geonetric builds websites for hospitals and health systems around the country. Founder and CEO Eric Engelmann said developers face technological and regulatory issues crafting and upgrading interactive websites.

'In the 1990s and early 2000s, the website was the place, the target destination,' Engelmann said. 'Now, it's being broken up into hundreds of difference social media pieces where your communication channel with customers is not the website anymore.

'It's email or Facebook or Instagram or Pinterest or, depending on what it is, could literally be hundreds. It's proliferating and that makes it more complicated to manage.'

Engelmann said Geonetric, which employs 80 people, sees that dramatic change providing a lot of opportunity going forward.

'Hospitals need a lot of help managing those same regulatory, security and other concerns through lots of channels,' he said. 'It's part of how we got into deciding to build the Iowa Startup Accelerator program. We wanted to observe other startup companies at the frontier of new business opportunities, sifting out those issues and trying to sort them out, helping them where we could and learning from them.'

The Iowa Startup Accelerator 90-day program is housed in Geonetric's three-story building. It recently launched its second cohort with a group of nine start-ups spanning health, music, commerce and education.

Engelmann said part of Geonetric's proposition is the ability to assist hospitals through all the technological changes.

'Some hospitals have one or two people in their communications department, while others have an army,' he said.

Geonetric's clients range from critical access hospitals in rural communities to health care systems covering, large metropolitan areas. Engelmann said Geonetric has to translate what each entity can offer the patient in a way that accurately conveys information and the organization's capabilities.

'We have a team of people who just write content,' he said. 'They interview stakeholders, physicians and clinicians. They take all that information and translate it into a story that describes the services that are available and how to make good decisions.'

With patients using devices ranging from an iPhone to a 60-inch monitor, Geonetric must create content on multiple channels — Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest — that will display properly.

'We spend a lot of time figuring out how to do that,' Engelmann said. 'Sometimes the content that we're communicating has to be different depending on the size of the screen. It's a real mashup of technology and how you use it in the marketplace.'

At Innovative Software Engineering (ISE) in Coralville, Hass Machlab, ISE founder, president and CEO, noted that, 'We do a lot of thinking ahead of our customers, what products or services will they need in the future. Our people go to a lot of seminars and conferences all over the country, so we can understand what's coming down the pike in technology.'

ISE, which was founded in 2002 and employs about 60 people, has three business segments:

•  Compliance Services provides eFleetSuite, the company's proprietary telematics or vehicle data collection product, to transportation industry service providers and includes safety and compliance applications such as electronic driver logs.
•  Fleet Services uses eFleetSuite to sell an end-to-end safety-focused plan geared toward commercial truck fleet customers in North America.
• Professional Services offers clients custom software development, including solutions in the areas of Big Data, mobile application development, vehicle telematics and engineering process.

Machlab said ISE has able to hire and retain business-minded, skilled software engineers.

'Internally we always have to work on our culture,' he said. 'We send people to conferences, enable them to get additional certifications and provide other educational opportunities.

'We do annual internal cultural surveys to determine what we need to do to make things better. We're constantly self-measuring, digging into our successes and challenges to improve our processes and make them better.'

A shortage of software engineers at the national level has driven up salaries in the industry and led to outsourcing large projects abroad, where costs are substantially lower, Machlab said.

'We think we have found our niche because we have business-minded engineers who provide high-quality, high-performance teams to meet our customers' needs,' he said. 'We look at our customers' entire systems because everything is interconnected.'