Early adoption

The guiding strategy for this earliest HP-UX release of a complex 3000 application was to change as little as possible. “Our strategy on doing the port was to keep the risk to a minimum,” McCarthy said.

Amisys has convinced three of its HP 3000 customers to implement the first release of Amisys Advance this year. McCarthy said customers need to reserve a long weekend of 3-4 days to make the move from their test environment of the HP-UX version to a production environment.

“We’re telling them to look at it as installing a major release of our product,” McCarthy said, and recommends testing over a 3-6 month period.

Customers will also be responsible for converting surround code, and for those with large installations, “that will be a major undertaking. We’re recommending they use Transoft for this, since Transoft can convert their code with all the same conventions they used on our application code.” Amisys believes that engaging Transoft can help ensure ports of customers’ surround code matches up with the changed source code in the Amisys application.

Amisys now sends a questionnaire to its customers to help them budget for the transition away from the HP 3000, and it negotiates a price for licenses with Cognos and other third party software which customers must use. Amisys will be collecting its own licensing fee from its customers for Amisys Advance, too. McCarthy said this fee will be about 20 percent of a full license for the product.

Customers won’t have any support for using their HP 3000 versions of the Amisys product after December, 2006, the date HP will stop selling support for the platform. A little more than half of the customer base has told Amisys they will make the shift to the HP-UX release, but haven’t specified a timetable to do so. About 25 customers have put down deposits to migrate. The migrating customers represent a full spectrum of shop sizes, Amisys says.

Release 1 of Amisys Advance will have its user screens in a green-screen, non-GUI format. Release 2 of Amisys Advance will bring Oracle database fine-tuning, more functionality and GUI interfaces. Performance benchmarks show customers will need about two and half times the Unix hardware as their 3000 configurations use to handle the workloads. Amisys says that if their customers are upgrading to newer HP 3000s, they are “trying to get our customers to buy enough [HP 3000] hardware that they can turn it into a 9000 and have what they need.”

Amisys said its move to HP-UX has succeeded where an earlier attempt failed because it ported its application this time, rather than attempting a rewrite.

The last try to move onto Unix “became a big project, and when we were acquired by McKessonHBOC there wasn’t a lot of funding for it,” McCarthy said. “This is truly a port. We didn’t change one line. Because it’s very tempting to want to change code when you’re in there, we told our developers that if they changed code they would be fired. We wanted to get it over there, and then develop it further. We used programmers with more than five years of experience with the product to do the work.”

Getting that work into the customer base becomes the next major effort for the company. Amisys is betting that as the MPE customer base starts to shift to the first release of Advance, the success stories will convince others to take the plunge.

But the early wave is small. “We have people who have signed up for the migration, but the first wave is a different story,” McCarthy says. “Nobody really wants to be first.” One beta test site has started its conversion, and another customer is planning to take delivery this summer.

“We’re really pretty happy” with the number of first wave migrations, McCarthy said. “We’ll have to see what happens in 2004.” HIPAA regulations took hold this year and many healthcare organizations are focusing on compliance with those privacy laws, “so they don’t have a lot of time for anything else right now.”