Robert Frist
Analyst · William Blair. Your line is open
Sure, sure. Let’s talk about that. I mean, a great question. So it is a new model and so, we have this - these new forms of connectivity that will allow applications that we like. Historically, we sold a platform like a learning platform and it drove consumption of content and that’s been a nice virtuous cycle. We sell the credentialing system and it drives consumption of things like Privilege Libraries and other form of content assets. In this case, what we are finding is that we can find companies that have really nice applications that may meet a need inside of our customers and help accelerate their growth as a business by better connectivity to our network of customers. And so, early on, as we learn how these connectivities work, we help these customers have access to our customers – these partners have access to our customer base and we integrate the technologies. They are kind of – it’s early stages, our first few. We wanted a little more control on those integration processes. A little more control over security. We wanted to have a little more, say, in the direction of – a little more of a voice in the direction of the companies and its growth strategies as it relates to our customer base and our market which is, as you know very large. And so, and a few of these early ones we have taken an equity position, but we only take the equity position to support some of that strong connectivity and early steering. I do not expect – we have other partners that are integrating with hStream where there is no equity involved. And in all cases, we expect the revenue share for helping connect these partners to our customers in helping them have visibility for their applications in our base. And so, a good example would be CloudCME. It’s a really fantastic company. It’s got a really nice and growing customer base. We found that it had a small company with a small overlap in customer base. But half their customers were HealthStream customers. And in effect, for them to implement at one of our health systems before their relation with HealthStream, they required almost all the same work that we would go through, data collection, connectivity to HR IS systems and this sort of application is very focused on the continuing medical education offers at hospitals. And we finally had about 15 customers in common. But the customers were treating us independently meaning that we both had to go through this periodically, both had to go through the data integration, we both had to set up data migration strategies. And so, through the relation with HealthStream, they will be a more automated quicker way. They can integrate once with the HealthStream network and then be activated our customers which we think will shorten their sales and implementation cycles and help them grow. And for that, we will take a revenue share. It’s very a candid way of force.com Application Partner Works or an Apple App Store app works. And again, we are new and it’s an immature process. We just hired new leadership and some of the connections aren’t as deep as we like them to be. So it’s very new. But our – the ultimate hope is that in the case of these companies to have more seamless connectivity to our platform which gives them more seamless connectivity to our marketplace and when they sell and grow their business and succeed, they will share some of those revenues with us for helping them grow and have access to our marketplace. And so, it’s new but you can think of these as new forms of applications, new form of content that we plan to lever. What’s exciting about is, each of those companies will be out promoting their connectivity to our platform as they walk into our customers. And we’ve begun the tour for example with NurseGrid. NurseGrid is a very exciting company. They are the top – we believe they are the number one nurse application in the Apple App Store and the Android app store. It’s a business-to-consumer app. The nurses download the app and allow them to share things like their schedules with each others. They can coordinate time together and those who are working on their shifts. Well, the company has built a business-to-business application that connects all those end-users and allows hospitals to better manage the schedules of their employees. So, now we are beginning to introduce the business-to-business software to our health system customers. It’s fantastic as we walk in and say, you know, health system A, did you know you have 3000 of your nurses already using NurseGrid. Would you like to take a look at this application and let you connect to those 3000 nurses and facilitate their schedule management. And so, HealthStream will be helping NurseGrid take their business-to-business application into our customer base and that internal help them connect to those nearly million downloads of the NurseGrid application. So, another – and we will revenue share for facilitating their growth and connectivity to our customers and it also sends it to workforce management application, it – that’s a growing need in our ecosystem and it’s consistent with managing the people of healthcare just as CME Cloud that’s focused on the physician education office in a hospital and is also an alignment with our educational offerings that we bring to the table. So, in those two cases, we are bringing innovative, Apple app driven applications to our customers that are consistent with our workforce development theme where we think we can help the companies grow. A minority investment non-controlling, so we can be involved in a bit of their governance to help them grow and then also oversee more tightly their technical integration and then a revenue share on the back-end when they are successful. Our goal is to make them the fastest growing applications in their respective categories by connecting into our customer base. Again it’s very early game, Richard. We only have these first three announcements are going to probably take our time with these three before signing up a lot more. We are going to try to make sure some of them are successful with where we go any further. I hope that helps.