IBM helps Planmeca provide most reliable and easy-to-use advanced dental imaging software solutions

About Planmeca

Headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, Planmeca designs, manufactures and markets high-tech dental equipment such as digital imaging products and dental care units. As a pioneer in digital imaging and advanced, computer-integrated dental office solutions, Planmeca was the first company in the world to use microprocessors in its dental care units. With significant, ongoing investment in research and development, Planmeca’s dental equipment is state-of-the art with innovative features and stylish design.

Planmeca is a global market-leader in high-tech dental equipment with considerable market share in the U.S., Japan, France and many other European countries. With over 1,700 employees, Planmeca is the largest privately-owned dental equipment manufacturer in Europe.

The challenge
To maintain a market leadership position and reputation of providing advanced, innovative dental equipment and solutions, Planmeca sought a data management platform to integrate into its digital imaging software offerings. The company needed a solution that would be reliable and easy to use, and would help maintain its competitive advantage of being first to market with new products to meet ever-changing market needs.

Reliable
Planmeca’s two main requirements when considering a database are reliability and ease of use.

The requirement for reliability comes from general healthcare regulations. Patient information and records need to be stored for long periods of time. Data accessibility is crucial as records must be available for 10 years.

Planmeca needed to combine a reliable, easy-to-use database to support its archiving systems. Planmeca was in search of a database system that would be reliable, technically “smart” yet simple, compact and easy to use.

Easy to use
IBM solidDB^™ is used in Planmeca’s Dimaxis product, a digital imaging software that links X-rays, video and still camera images. This requires a database capable of storing hundreds of gigabytes.

Planmeca provides a complete digital dental office solution mainly for small companies. The dentists who own and manage these practices and the staff that use the equipment are not usually technically oriented. Therefore, Planmeca’s customers need full-service packages that are reliable and easy to use. Data failure is not an option for Planmeca’s customers. Planmeca needed a data management platform that could be seamlessly integrated and be “invisible to end users.”

This is what IBM solidDB offers.

Flexible to adapt to change
Planmeca believes dental care in developing countries will quickly move into the digital age.

This opportunity will create a demand to upgrade dental equipment. And this new equipment will need to be even more user-friendly.

Data system requirements are becoming more complex with more types of data and more transactions to maintain. Not only images will be stored, but also a wider spectrum of patient history and equipment and process information.

These emerging markets will bring new challenges due to new requirements in appointment reservation systems and larger customers such as hospitals and medical groups. Large hospital complexes with hundreds of dental equipment users will create higher data performance demands with the same ease-of-use requirements.

Adaptability to change is vital for these data-driven applications. Usage patterns for this new breed of services are often unpredictable, requiring data management solutions to dynamically adapt to changes in workload and to other unique application requirements. IBM solidDB^™ provides the lightning-fast speed, high availability and flexibility Planmeca needs to leverage these market opportunities.
With IBM solidDB data management platform, companies, like Planmeca, can build reliable, robust and cost-effective solutions by using the power and reliability of a proven database with over three million instances deployed in production around the globe.

Why IBM solidDB won
Choosing IBM solidDB gave Planmeca the ability to seamlessly integrate into its solutions to provide a fast, always-on and easy-to-use data management solution.

The ability to embed IBM solidDB helps Planmeca minimize its customers’ need to administer the data management platform. With IBM solidDB embedded directly into its digital imaging software solutions, data management becomes an integral part of Planmeca’s overall product with no visible aspect to end users. Planmeca’s customers can reduce support costs because all routine installation, day-to-day administration and essential upgrade tasks can be automated without requiring any outside intervention.

About IBM solidDB
On January 30, 2008, IBM completed the acquisition of Solid Information Technology, a privately-held company based in Cupertino, California that was the leading provider of fast, always-on and affordable database solutions known as solidDB.

There are more than three million deployments of Solid’s database technology worldwide in telecommunications networks, enterprise applications, and embedded software and systems. Market leaders such as Alcatel, Cisco, EMC2, HP, Nokia and Siemens rely on IBM solidDB for their mission-critical applications.

IBM and Solid Information Technology together strengthen IBM’s Information Management Data Management offerings by combining the speed of Solid’s in-memory data server with the enterprise-wide scalability of IBM’s existing on-disk data servers.

Key Components

Software
IBM solidDB^™

For more information
Please contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner.

Visit us at: www.ibm.com/software/data/soliddb

For more information about Planmeca, visit: www.planmeca.com