Deepa Swamy joined Eyefinity^® around 2013 and now leads the point-of-sale team for Eyefinity Encompass™. For the past seven years, most of her work has been focused on developing software for independent eye care providers, but she is starting to take on more work with retail chains, which allows her to experience eye care from a different user perspective.

One trend that Deepa has witnessed across all business types is the “touch-first approach.” Smaller practices have the ability to conduct day-to-day operations or tasks on mobile devices like smartphones or tablets. Now, with Eyefinity Encompass, that capability is expanding to larger eye care enterprises.

“As exciting as these front-end changes are for the user experience, we’re working on enormous back-end preparation for Encompass as well,” Deepa says. “We’re essentially rewriting all the older, ‘legacy’ code for Eyefinity software, which we refer to as technology modernization.”

While it’s not as visible to customers, it’s no less impressive. This legacy code lives in an application called a monolith—a massive code base that, when updated, can present challenges. If one thing inadvertently breaks in the monolith, it can have unintended impacts elsewhere. Deepa’s team is working to not only modernize the code by rewriting it, but by splitting it off into containers so the code performs better, is more agile, and is less volatile during changes.

These modernization efforts take place throughout the software, from how the software looks to users, to new pricing screens, to insurance calculations, and beyond.

“We have more servers and environments to maintain as new customers are coming in,” she says. “We’re trying to see if some of those things can be automated better, so we don’t have to disrupt workflows, which will improve things for everyone, regardless of the size of their practice.”