Austin Health Launches Enterprise-Wide Migration of MultiValue Applications to InterSystems CACHÉ

Release Date: Tuesday, November 25, 2008

InterSystems Corporation today announced that Austin Health in Melbourne, Australia has rolled out the first component of an enterprise-wide migration of MultiValue applications to the InterSystems CACHÉ ® high-performance object database. Taking advantage of industry-leading CACHÉ MultiValue (MV) capabilities, Austin Health has gone live with its Allied Health Appointments (AHA) application in a rollout that will ultimately result in moving systems currently running on the Reality-X MV platform to CACHÉ .

Future-Proofing Legacy Applications

"We were facing a challenge that is familiar to many IT executives," said Paul Girdler, Application Services Manager at Austin Health. "We have a series of legacy application systems developed in-house that worked quite well. However, there had been no ongoing development or upgrades on the applications or the Reality-X platform since 2000. We wanted to modernize the systems with new Web interfaces and get them to a level where we could identify potential productivity gains that could be derived by taking advantage of new technologies."

Girdler's team researched multiple alternatives including a complete rewrite of the organisation's applications. "Rewriting is certainly one way to go, but it certainly didn't seem the most optimal use of development time and resources," he said.

Instead, Austin Health chose to migrate its legacy applications to the CACHÉ platform. In addition to delivering top-tier performance and massive scalability, CACHÉ enables rapid web application development and high-performance transaction processing, and provides advanced MV capabilities.

"We had been running the InterSystems TrakCareT hospital information system successfully for years, so we were familiar with InterSystems ' technology leadership," Girdler said. "CACHÉ with MV clearly offered an extremely cost-effective migration route that would not only offer improved performance and scalability but also provide interoperability with other systems and advanced application development features. With CACHÉ ," Girdler continued, "we are effectively future-proofing our core enterprise applications."

After the successful trial migration, Austin Health mounted an aggressive porting initiative. "We kicked it off with the migration of the AHA system-a large, complex application used by multiple departments across the three campuses that make up the Austin hospital group," he said. "Based on the success of that migration-the first departments went live in May-and the positive response of the application's end users, the organisation is now moving forward to port the remaining applications to CACHÉ . "

Setting Stage for New Development, Dramatically Slashing Costs

"CACHÉ has given us the opportunity to take an existing, 20-year-old application and migrate it to a contemporary platform that will support rapid development of new application enhancements," Girdler summarised. "And, we're achieving these results in the most cost-effective way possible-CACHÉ is only a fraction of the growing cost of licensing the legacy database software. Finally, the support we've received from InterSystems has been amazing and we appreciate the opportunity to continue what is obviously a very successful working partnership."

"Austin Health's success is a textbook example of how organisations can extend the life of key enterprise systems while simultaneously positioning themselves for future development," said Denis Tebbutt, Managing Director for Australia and New Zealand. "We value our ongoing partnership and look forward to supporting their transition strategy as they take advantage of the rapid development and deployment capabilities of CACHÉ ."