People

iNTERFACEWARE isn't structured like a typical technology corporation—which, frankly, is seldom optimized for client success.

Optimized for Client Success Rather than Exit

Most modern technology organizations are designed for fast growth and quick acquisition, so the founders can cash out. After that, you can usually expect prices to rise, service to deteriorate, and little attention paid to the product itself—which is supposedly the next “AI-powered, FHIR-enabled” gadget that never quite works.

These companies often have impressive-sounding governance boards filled with expensive, paid consultants promoting generally mediocre products. They’re awash in stock options and marketing photos of excited-looking young millennial employees hoping for a rocket-ship ride. We decided the millennial look would look better than we do, so we generated this nice AI image—you probably won’t find any of us in a stock photo, but thankfully, our work speaks for itself!

Our Story

iNTERFACEWARE is different. At its core is Eliot Muir—the same person who has been diligently running the company since he first started writing code for Chameleon in Chicago back in 1997. He later moved to Canada, where he spent 25 successful years before deciding to run the business from a new, more tax-efficient location.

After a year and a half of trying to get the Canadian team to help restructure the business, Eliot finally thought, “Screw it,” and decided to move forward with a new approach.

It turned out to be the best business decision ever. The business (no longer a company in the traditional sense) has been greatly improved. It's turned out to be a much lower-stress organization to manage—more efficient, more agile, and able to have a much larger impact. Many of our clients have been asking how we did it and if we could help them transform their organizations in the same way. That has become a significant part of how we grow our relationships with clients: by helping them realize the same efficiencies that can be achieved using the Theory of Constraints and systems thinking.

How We Work

When you have a product like Iguana, engineered to such an extreme degree it just works, it truly changes what’s possible.

But iNTERFACEWARE isn’t just Eliot. After some experimentation (Eliot once believed he could run the whole thing himself), we’ve found that about four people is the optimal team size—a significant reduction from the 28 staff we used to have. Here are the roles we’ve found necessary:

Support is handled between Julian and Eliot, and it works very well. We respond quickly and intelligently to the handful of issues that crop up now and then.

We also bring in like-minded individual consultants and affiliates for specific projects or clients that need larger solutions.

Moving forward, we intend to do things using more of an open-source model. We realize that for critical infrastructure software, this is necessary, but we don’t fully do it with Iguana 6 yet. The reason is that the code is legacy—open-sourcing it would be too risky, and we also need to be realistic about the transition process. No, Iguana 6 is not free, and like every business, you can be certain that we do care about being paid. However, we always structure things so that our customers get real value for what they pay.

Honestly, Iguana actually saves our customers a lot of money. It’s a really solid product
that makes it possible for our clients to make their IT actually work for them.