Amisys Synertech touted new HP-UX sites for migrations

Healthcare customers are just starting to arrive on the new Amisys Advance application, according to the PR department at the vendor which still counts about 100 customers on HP 3000s. Amisys had contracted with Transoft to move its application to HP’s Unix environment, and it announced the port of its application was complete last summer. Nine months later, the vendor reports that four health plans serving nearly two million members throughout the US are migrating to the Amisys Advance payer software application. Two of the plans might be running their HP 3000 Amisys data on HP 9000 systems by the end of this quarter.

Amisys called the four health plans “early adopters of Amisys Advance, the evolutionary replacement for Amisys 3000.” This first version of Advance which the sites are installing still lacks a graphical user interface, a feature scheduled for this year’s release of Advance. Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee and Scott & White were the sites most likely to finish a migration this quarter. But the vendor felt confident enough about its first Advance release to compare its performance with the MPE-based Amisys 3000.

“In benchmark testing by Amisys Synertech on Amisys Advance Release 1.00.04, which became available to customers [last] June, batch processing ran faster, resulting in improved batch processing times.” A closer look at the benchmarks seemed to show faster HP-UX servers being used in the comparison.

An Amisys spokesman said the batch comparison was between an HP 3000 N-Class 330 single-processor model, “using the current Amisys 3000 Release 11.01,” and “Amisys Advance Release 1 benchmarks that occurred at the HP Paramus facility utilizing a fully loaded [HP-UX] rp8400 (16-way with 64 GB memory) on a dedicated Amisys Synertech server (either a rp7410 8-way with 16 GB, or a fully loaded rp8400).”

Amisys Advance Release 1.00.04 is a direct port of Amisys 3000 Release 11.01, and so Advance is still less than fully optimized for the Oracle database at its core. The comparisons appear to rely on faster clock rates for the Unix processors; HP has clocked down PA-RISC processors in the N-Class system that Amisys used in the comparison. The CPUs run at full speed in the HP-UX servers. Amisys confirmed the Unix test systems for the Advance benchmarks were running from two to four processors per server.

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