Oracle and Micro Focus replace IBM with Sun at HBA

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 04 April 2006 11:18

IT Industry - Deals

Legacy systems redevelopment specialist, Micro Focus and Oracle have team to do a large scale systems migration at Australia's third largest health insurer HBA, moving the company from an IBM mainframe to a lower cost Sun Solaris environment.
According to the two vendors, the move to Solaris running Micro Focus Server and Oracle Database has saved HBA $2 million a year. HBA, which is owned by the global BUPA healthcare group, plans to add a web services layer to integrate various systems.

“Many options were considered, including creating a completely new system in Australia, or using the same system as our parent company as a base for the new system,” said Peter Powell, CIO, BUPA Australia.  “However, none of these options really matched our requirements or fitted into the time available.  Plus, the savings we’re making by migrating our applications to Unix are being re-invested to extend the services we provide our members.”

The software and hardware migration to Micro Focus, Oracle, and Sun was completed in 14 months.  Powell estimates an ROI of just under three years for the migration, which saw the conversion of 5,000 programs, six million lines of code, four programming languages, and tens of thousands of files.

“Customers can clearly benefit from our combined technology,” said Lance Knowlton, vice president of Oracle Modernisation Solutions, Oracle.  “This effort allows customers to capitalise on the strategic value of Oracle technology while advancing their most difficult application modernisation efforts.”

"Micro Focus recognises the significant investments many organisations have made in legacy applications and the challenges they face as they evaluate approaches for deriving further benefits from those investments," said Mike Gilbert, vice president of worldwide marketing at Micro Focus.  "By working with Oracle, we are committed to providing a robust and extensive modernisation strategy for organisations to unearth even greater value from their legacy systems."