To our Ovation customers,

In the midst of a global pandemic, you are working every day to serve your patients and a society that need diagnostic testing more than ever. You are making the world better for each patient you serve. You also place great trust in us to provide reliable and performant service every hour of every day so that your lab can perform at its peak. We’re honored to be your partner in this effort, and we feel an incredible responsibility to live up to your highest expectations. We own that, recently, we have missed the mark.

The Ovation system is now processing ten times more samples per day than pre-pandemic. Based on our projections, we expect to be processing ten times more again within the next two months. We’re excited about your increased testing volume and we appreciate that you need Ovation to consistently perform so that you can successfully run your business. As many of you have noticed, we’ve had some challenges with that increased volume.

I’m writing today to share what we’ve done and what we have in progress to address the current performance issues and prepare for even more growth.

First, we’ve redirected our top engineering talent to this challenge. In the past several weeks, this dedicated team has grown our internal testing infrastructure to test Ovation against usage many times the current production load to find issues long before you do. They’ve shipped several changes that are already producing effective results. For example the workflow page loads more than twice as fast, and batch creation for large batches is many times faster. But we know that some customers are still experiencing performance issues in certain situations. Our engineers have additional improvements in various stages of development and testing now and will continue identifying the next best thing to attack until all is well.

Second, we are accelerating plans to enhance our underlying infrastructure—the servers, databases, and networks that we use to provide Ovation—from one that is managed by a third party to one we manage ourselves. This change will enable our team to monitor system performance and diagnose issues more readily. The new infrastructure is also more scalable, allowing us to respond to  increased demand more quickly and to support a rapidly growing global demand more reliably. This change will happen during a scheduled maintenance window that starts Sunday, June 7, 2020 at 9:00PM EST.

Everyone in this business is dealing with dramatically increased volume, including us. We want to assure you  that our work to provide you with complete confidence in the reliability and consistency of our products is our number one priority.  And we will succeed in that endeavor.

Together we can change the world!

Be well,

Barry Wark, PhD

Co-founder and CEO, Ovation.io