- Hello, and welcome to Community Chats.
I'm Aley Hammer,
and today we're interviewing James Manner,
the co-founder of Pliny.
James, welcome to the show.
Can you start by telling our audience
a little bit about Pliny
and the problem that you're solving for your customers?
- Thanks, Aley.
So Pliny is a cloud-based image management system
for optometrists, ophthalmologists and cardiologists.
Anyone of the viewers here
who have been to an optometrist, an ophthalmologist,
will have had any number of digital scans of their eyes.
And we are working to make it easier and faster
for clinicians to view, store, and manage those scans
so that they can spend more time
concentrating on their patients
and less time concentrating on wrangling their computer
to find the correct scan
from the correct program and the like.
- What a convenient service for your customers.
And James, why did you pick AWS as your cloud provider?
- I've been working with AWS for the best part
of five, nearly six years.
So,
we initially used AWS
because of the familiarity with their services,
but the reality is the service profile,
the different services such as AppSync and S3 that AWS have,
really match well with what we're trying to build with Pliny
in terms of mass cloud storage.
You know, for instance, our customers have terabytes of data
and S3 allows us to scale and securely store all of that.
So the service offering from AWS
really closely aligns with what our product is,
and being able to abstract the heavy lifting for-
The heavy lifting of that technology
allows us to concentrate on building things
that our customers need
and not on the infrastructure
and the non-visible
features of our product.
- Absolutely, thanks for sharing.
And James, can you share some insights
into how your technology benefits your customers?
And what I want to know is,
where does AWS fit in with this?
Because I think you referenced that
you've had some awesome credits
that you passed on to your customers.
- At the end of the day, one of the core benefits
shifting to the cloud is just removing the headache
of managing the IT infrastructure for our customers.
So you mentioned the Credits Program,
one of our major customers
we are able to save them the first year
in nearly $40,000
by removing the need for them to upgrade their services
across our eight different sites,
servers across their eight different sites,
sorry, that is.
And as part of the Credits Program,
we, Pliny, were able to offer our customer
two years free cloud hosting as well.
So the Credits Program that AWS provided,
we were able to in turn pass that onto our customer.
And that was really critical
to us onboarding our first large customer,
and demonstrating that
we really did have a product
and that it was gonna be a real benefit to our customers.
So it was really important.
So the AWS Credits Program is really important to us.
It was really important to our customer,
'cause our customer was a public health organization
who, when COVID, were dramatically hit
by a reduction in revenue.
And it was a win-win for everybody.
- Wow, I'm sure your customer was so pleased
when they were able to obtain two years free hosting.
That's huge.
And James, to round off this interview,
what are your future plans for Pliny?
- Oh, (chuckling) world domination.
No. No, that's probably a little bit grand.
No, look,
we are concentrating on being able
to increase our customer base at the moment.
That's our number one priority at the moment.
We've working on sort of two steps for future growth.
So number one is to allow digital collaboration,
digital sharing of these raw scans,
to be able to move beyond
sending and exchanging faxes,
which is pretty common in the healthcare industry,
and, at best, maybe a PDF,
to be able to exchange and collaborate on the raw scans,
opening up telehealth for ocular and cardiology
which previously hasn't been available.
So that's sort of our next goal.
And then our third goal is,
being able to integrate AI analysis into Pliny
that allows clinicians to be able to have diagnostic aids
where images and scans are automatically graded
and flagged as a risk for various diseases.
So that's a massive benefit for our customers,
being clinicians.
It's a risk management tool
so that they can ensure that every image
has a second set of eyes,
excuse the pun, cast over them,
and
minimizing the likelihood
that they're gonna miss any conditions
or anything that needs to get reviewed by themselves
or referred onto other providers.
- Well, you're doing such fantastic work over at Pliny
and we're so thrilled to partner with you, James.
Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
And if anyone has any questions,
please pop them in the comment section below
and we'll get back to you.
Thank you so much, James.
- Thanks Aley. Have a great day.
- You too.