Our Customers: VirtaMed

VirtaMed is a Zurich, Switzerland-based company that develops virtual reality simulators for post-graduate medical education. Since 2007, the company has been enabling surgeons to attain proficiency in medical education through the integration of intelligent simulation. The company’s mission is to improve medical education providing its customers with both, software and hardware to achieve that. VirtaMed collaborates with hospitals, medical societies, and medical device companies to integrate its simulation and advanced data analytics into medical education.

VirtaMed's main product is its medical simulators. In such hardware centric scenarios, licensing focuses on machine-based authorization rather than user-based.

Previously, licensing and activation was based on USB dongles. Although such dongles did perform their main task, they were inherently inflexible, since every license change, inevitably required a new dongle being configured and shipped to the end customer.

VirtaMed required a more adaptable, online-based licensing and entitlements framework. Developing and hosting an in-house licensing solution was quickly ruled out, and SLASCONE stepped in.

With SLASCONE, the initial activation of the hardware is done internally, before being shipped to the customer. Once on the customer's premises, the medical simulators do not have to be continuously online all for license compliance. Any licensing modification, such as an upgrade or downgrade, is executed immediately the next time the device connects to the internet through a simple request to the SLASCONE API. There are no longer any dongles.

The current setup consists of standardized basic and advanced license editions depending on the use case of their clients. However, more customized editions are now technically possible, and thus coming soon for VirtaMed's customers. The idea of experimenting with a user-based, rather than a device based license model is already being considered.

VirtaMed does not use the SLASCONE SaaS solution, but a Private Azure deployment, hosted in Switzerland instead. This option was a big plus for VirtaMed's IT department, due to existing Azure infrastructure and in-house expertise.

VirtaMed uses Microsoft's Business Central for managing their internal processes. Thanks to an Azure Logic App, initial connectivity between Business Central and SLASCONE was established in a matter of minutes. More importantly, VirtaMed's engineers are able to easily enhance this integration at any moment, by leveraging SLASCONE's modern and well documented API, without requiring assistance from the SLASCONE team.