January 12, 1998 (Vol. 20, Issue 2)

Health care IT provider looks to IBM for migration to NT

By Steven E. Brier
InfoWorld 

When HBO and Co. (HBOC), a leading provider of IT services to the health care industry, decided to make many of its applications available on Windows NT and SQL Server, the company could have turned to Microsoft for help or done the work in-house.

Instead, it turned to IBM.

"IBM was willing to step up to the plate," says Jay Gilbertson, HBOC's president and chief financial officer in Atlanta. "Number one, they have a better hardware reputation and are forward-thinking. Number two, they have a decent relationship with Microsoft, and number three, they have a wonderful distribution channel both here and around the world."

HBOC decided to make its applications available on NT and work with SQL Server to reduce costs for its customer base, a wide range of health care organizations to which it provides information technology services and support. The company will continue to provide its applications on mainframe platforms.

"A lot of our customers [once] ran on mainframes, and now run on servers. Hardware costs went from about $1 million to about $400,000. Our feeling is that the costs can be further reduced if they can move to an NT platform. If you look at a license for an SQL Server versus Sybase or Oracle, it is probably 10 times cheaper [to use Microsoft]," Gilbertson said.

Given the consolidation in the health care industry, these costs arise a lot for HBOC's customers.

"We have about half of our applications running on NT," Gilbertson states. "Most were developed in an SQL Server environment, or we were able to port things that came from a Sybase application. What we do not have in-house is a lot of experts on moving from an Oracle database to SQL. It is pretty complex, much more than just a port. You have a lot of code to change."

With IBM's help, HBOC hopes to make its applications on NT available by July.

"IBM has a lot of groups that see NT as a big opportunity," says Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst at International Data Corp., in Framingham, Mass. "IBM can come in and say `our management and integration tools can make NT manageable and bring it into the enterprise.'"

IBM, in Armonk, N.Y., can be reached at (800) 426-3333.