What powers your vet clinic’s software? 🐶 🐱 🐰 🐹 🐭 🦎 🐕 🐈
I’ve taken my pets to the same corner vet a few times recently - one for a checkup, another because he got sick - Benedito is better now! Thank God!
While there, I noticed something familiar on the screen: a old Windows application UI. That software is Cornerstone, a widely used veterinary practice management system developed by IDEXX around the early 2000s.
What I didn’t expect is that it was implemented in PowerBuilder and SQL Anywhere tech stack.
Cornerstone is deployed in tens of thousands of clinics globally - I've seen mentions of 125,000 locations. There is even a Facebook user's group "Cornerstone Users Unite".
Sites such as CapTerra and DigiTail (industry reviews) list the Cornerstone support contract at around $500/month. That means hundreds of millions in recurring revenue - all running on local servers, maintained by each clinic, with aging interfaces and limited remote access. For IDEXX, it is a smaller revenue category though: less than 9% of total as per their 2024 results. They get a lot more revenue from their assay, lab and instruments categories.
After digging through user reviews and Reddit veterinary discussions, I saw this pattern:
- veteran users like (some even say "love") Cornerstone for its depth and lab integration (requests and results going directly from/to the patient's record)
- integration with other vet industry companies (labs, insurance, radiology, accounting) is well valued by users
- but new staff often struggle with the dated interface, which is considered complex, having to navigate through the screens, use right click, etc to perform certain tasks
- Cornerstone support is considered excellent and I've checked their documentation and online training: it seems really good and detailed
- there are cloud alternatives like ezyVet, NaVetor, or Hippo Manager with modern UIs, mobility, and faster updates - but Cornerstone’s robustness is mentioned often
- clinics using Cornerstone also shoulder the burden of maintaining local servers and backups, while newer systems roll that into their monthly fee
- but for some, having everything on-site seems an extra precaution against attacks coming via internet and some rural clinics don't have fast internet
Interesting to see a legacy tech stack still thriving at this scale! Some users call it efficient and reliable while others see it as overdue for replacement.
In spite of the future clearly leaning towards cloud, Cornerstone still seems very much embedded in the daily operations of veterinary care.
Idexx has a couple of cloud-based alternatives too: Idexx ezyVet and Idexx Neo, this latter looks more like Salesforce UI than any others I've seen.
By the way, Idexx does use Salesforce too, as far as I could check, in their BioResearch division, Sales and likely in their Vello, a pet owner engagement product.
