Amisys reaches for Oracle, Transoft for application port

Healthcare app provider says sticking to 11.01 functions will speed transition

Trying again, after you don’t at first succeed, will involve changing development goals for Amisys LLC, the company serving about 100 healthcare organizations in the US with its HP 3000 solution. The firm wants to move its customers to the Unix platform, just as it did in the late 1990s with its failed Amisys Open initiative. This time around the project to move the complex application suite will begin as a port of existing functionality, instead of a rewrite with new features and a new front end.

Keeping the project’s scope in check isn’t the only thing different about this attempt, according to company COO Kathy McCarthy and development VP Al Gain. Amisys has engaged Transoft, a firm with extensive migration experience, to help move the Amisys/3000 software to HP-UX. It plans to have a product to sell in little more than a year, with first release of Amisys Advance available in June of 2003.

The company will move its core database from IMAGE/SQL on the 3000 to Oracle, Gain said, but it hasn’t decided yet which version of Oracle to support. Eloquence, the HP database product designed as a clone of IMAGE for Unix, Linux and NT platforms, didn’t make the cut for customers with some of the community’s biggest datasets.

“We evaluated all the databases to make sure we came up with the right fit,” Gain said. “Our application utilizes jumbo datasets, and that was a big issue for us in evaluating Eloquence. At the time we looked at it, Eloquence was only emulating IMAGE, and not TurboIMAGE. That’s one of the reasons we dismissed Eloquence.”

The application will also shift to MicroFocus COBOL, which Gain described as “the most stable.” The company’s developers will work with Transoft, who Gain described as “experts at migration of COBOL. They helped us with the decision of going with MicroFocus. With our experience level, they said that was the most stable and most successful option.”

Unlike its efforts to move to what it considered more open platforms in the past, the new transition project at Amisys won’t try to rewrite the front-end of the software in Forte. “We’re using all of our development staff,” Gain said. “In the Amisys Open project, they brought in a lot of consultants to do the work, and didn’t have as much knowledge on the Amisys product itself.”

“Trying to reverse-engineer our business logic to put it into a Forte application took a tremendous amount of work and time,” Gain said. “We’re not doing that. None of the business logic will be changing. When we go forward to the new platform, we’re just simply changing tools.”

Robelle’s Suprtool and Cognos’ PowerHouse will remain part of Amisys. Functionality in the 11.01 version of the product — the last version set for release on HP 3000 hardware — will form the baseline for Amisys Advance functions. The earliest version of Advance will use a character-based interface. Graphical interfaces are scheduled for 2004.

For the next several years, using an HP 3000 will give customers the same functions as any future Unix-based product from Amisys. COO McCarthy said “people will be able to stay on the 11.0 release for a period of time, and get the same functionality as the Advance product. But that will allow us to gradually migrate everybody before [HP’s] discontinuance of support for the 3000 platform.”

The company isn’t planning on using third-party support services beyond HP’s schedule, McCarthy added. “Nobody’s asked us for that so far,” she said.

Moving to Amisys Advance will incur an extra license fee, she added, but the company will be giving its existing customers “a significant discount.” The license fee will be based on membership size. McCarthy expected to have more details on the discount in the company’s June user meeting.