It's been a long time in coming, but ClearVantage 7 has arrived. And based on my unbiased judgment, it is well worth the wait!

I cannot think of a better way to celebrate our 10 year anniversary and to thank our many longstanding clients  than to launch a product that once again sets the industry standard.

ClearVantage 7 is the foundation of Euclid's future. However, in creating it, we did not abandon our past (and more importantly, our current clients): While ClearVantage 7 is built upon state of the art technology, it is 100% backward compatible.  Before talking about some of the great new features of ClearVantage 7, I think this last point - that ClearVantage 7 is fully backward compatible - deserves some more discussion.

I have been in the software industry for close to twenty years and in the association management software business for over ten. During this time I have watched as vendors abandoned their existing clients to create the next versions of their software. When a new technology becomes available, it is often seen by a vendor as a silver bullet to solve their application development and support woes. It also allows a vendor to state that they are using "the latest technology" and makes it easier for them to create an application that demonstrates well in sales presentations (i.e., the big gee whiz factor). Furthermore, it is often easier and cheaper to create a new version from scratch as opposed to porting the existing application to a new platform.  There are of course many pitfalls to this approach, the foremost being that if a vendor created a poor product with the previous toolset, it is highly likely that it will create a poor product with the new tool set. After all, creating great software is like creating a great building - without great architectural design, the building itself will

suffer, regardless of the tools used to build it. Furthermore, in software development, when you completely throw away the old, many of the pieces that worked soundly and were trusted in the past no longer work in the future. All developers believe that they can rewrite and make the software better - however, it has been proven over and over that this is not the case. Newer yes, better, not usually. And of course, if you are a customer using the previous version, well, you are completely out of luck: you have to go through a completely new implementation to get what amounts to a version 1 product - which is very costly and risky. Furthermore, it is almost always the case that the "latest version" sacrifices usability and functionality at the customer's expense: There may be a new "gee whiz" interface, but it lacks many of the features that users and members need to get their tasks done (which of course is the entire purpose of the software).

Our goals for ClearVantage 7 were multifaceted. First, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for users to get their jobs done effectively. To this effect, we have greatly improved the user interface and added the ability to access ClearVantage from virtually any device - even a smart phone. Second, we wanted to provide more tools to help our clients improve member service and grow revenue. The new, more advanced querying, business intelligence and communication features are unmatched by competitive offerings. Third, we wanted to ensure that from a technical standpoint ClearVantage would be state of the art both now and in the future. ClearVantage 7 leverages Euclid's powerful service oriented architecture and is the first AMS to run natively on Vista (while also being fully compatible with XP and Windows 2003). ClearVantage 7 has also been architected to take advantage of dual and quad core processors and 64 bit processors. It is lightning fast. Fourth, we wanted to make sure that Euclid continued to provide the "right

From the CEO

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