Software of Excellence wins school contracts

Wednesday May 11th, 2005

Software of Excellence wins dental school contracts in the US, UK and Australia

Software of Excellence CEO Brian Weatherly today announced that the company has secured a commitment from four dental schools in the United States to upgrade to SOEI’s software.

He says that Loma Linda, Louisville, San Antonio and Florida dental schools have contracted to upgrade towards SOEI’s new generation of dental software. The first upgrades will be implemented in June 2006.

The schools are customers of General System Design Inc which SOEI acquired in July.

Under the agreements the four dental schools will to transfer from GSD to a product offering that consists of the core Software of Excellence software with some enhancements moved from the GSD product.

The cost of developing the enhanced product is being shared by the universities, who are paying a monthly development fee effective from signing until the software is installed.

Brian Weatherly says the US dental school market is in the early stages of clinical software adoption, and for customers to more confidently embrace this technology there needs to be mature products available and a clear market leader.

SOEI’s goal in acquiring GSD was to seek to accelerate both the development of a mature product for the US market, and the establishment of a clear market leader. “We have been working with the GSD’s dental school clients and our existing dental school clients to define a more mature product offering in the USA, which will include the best features of both SOEI’s existing product, and GSD's software. “This commitment of four GSD customers to switch to this new product is a significant validation of this strategy. It is planned that our existing US dental school clients will also upgrade to this improved product in due course, and there have been indications that other GSD customers will also move.”
He says the company has also recently won software contracts for Griffith University dental school in Queensland, Australia, and Portsmouth School of Dentistry in England, the first dental school in the UK to purchase software since the launch of the British Government’s major Health IT initiative.

In the UK SOEI has also secured agreement by Optical Express to acquire licences for the former Boots DentalCare sites. Another major dental chain, Oasis has also agreed to switch 40 sites from a competing product to SOEI’s software.

Brian Weatherly says the latest dental school contracts will have a positive impact on the company’s profit for the current March 31, 2006 financial year.

SOEI is due to announce its current year’s result on May 23: “At this stage we expect the result for the year at the EBITDA level to be at the high end of the range of $1.9 million to $2.3 million, which we indicated in February. This equates to an EBITDA to sales margin of 9.5% to 11.5%,” says Brian Weatherly.

ENDS

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