Pathology Associates Medical Laboratories Selects InterSystems CACHÉ Database
InterSystems Corp. has announced that Pathology Associates Medical Laboratories (PAML) has selected the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance object database as the database for their laboratory billing system. PAML is the largest independent laboratory in the Northwest.
According to Paul Grabscheid, InterSystems vice president of strategic planning, there were three major factors in PAML's selection of CACHÉ. “As a medical customer, reliability and availability are very important to them so I think some of the high availability features of CACHÉ were key,” said Grabscheid. Second, he noted, “The performance and the ability to scale up as their business grows was important to them.” Additionally, Grabscheid stated, PAML has “some new development that they want to do so some of the flexibility and open capabilities were key for that.”
CACHÉ offers an open environment “so we can leverage technologies such as Java, .NET and Web services,” noted Mark Johnston, CIO, PAML, at the time of the announcement. He said the speed of CACHÉ was important to PAML's database technology selection. "We wanted to move forward as rapidly as possible with migrating the billing system to a new, high-performance platform that provides top-level MultiValue facilities," Johnston said.
InterSystems is a leading provider of innovative database and integration software. Its product line includes the InterSystems CACHÉ high-performance object database, InterSystems Ensemble rapid integration platform, and InterSystems HealthShare platform for regional and national electronic health records. Headquartered in Spokane, WA, PAML delivers a wide range of testing services to thousands of physicians and more than 100 hospitals throughout a core market that includes Washington, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, California, Utah, Wyoming and Alaska.
In addition to using the billing application internally for the testing services that it provides, PAML offers billing services to more than 20 medical laboratories, and expects that base to continue growing. CACHÉ offers the “high availability and massive scalability” needed to support PAML's end-users as well as the outside customer population while also providing a direct MultiValue migration path that minimizes the challenges of a legacy system migration, according to Johnston.
For more information about InterSystems, go here. For more about PAML, go here.
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ISS Announces Middleware Components and Connectors
for MultiValue
Integral Solutions
& Systems (ISS), Valencia, Spain, has announced the availability
of a complete suite of .NET and Java middleware products for MultiValue
operating environments. According to the vendor, after five years
of production testing running on mission-critical production systems,
the ISS Middleware Components have been significantly enhanced to
support the latest development tools and are now available to all
MultiValue customers directly from ISS at a fraction of the cost
of similar products in the market. “Now we are ready to offer
our products directly to the MultiValue community,” explained
Manuel Beltran, president and chief technologist of ISS, in making
the announcement.
According to
the company, the ISS Pick Data Provider for .NET and ISS Java Data
Provider products are intended to enable the latest IDEs from Microsoft,
Sun, IBM, Borland and others to natively access MultiValue data
and execute Pick Basic subroutines with ease from .NET and Java
respectively. On the .NET front, an Orcas release with LINQ support
Beta Program will be announced soon.
The ISS Microsoft
Reporting Services Connector allows software developers and end-users
to create business intelligence reports directly out of MultiValue
data files through existing dictionary definitions and distribute
feature rich output in a variety of formats. The flexibility provided
by SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to create, design, distribute
and manage reports is supported for MultiValue data, the vendor
states. Additionally, ISS's Proxy Server circles the ISS middleware
offering with a high throughput gateway that maximizes user accessibility
with minimum database license requirements.
For more information,
go here or send an email
to info@pickdp.com.
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Sierra Bravo Releases Free Software to Create Desktop Widgets
Sierra Bravo has announced the release of free software for Pick programmers for the creation of desktop widgets. Bravo Dashboard enables Pick programmers to install a dashboard of widgets, dynamically creating an always-current picture of their most important business metrics.
“Bravo Dashboard is designed to really leverage the strengths of the Pick programmer. It allows somebody who has a lot of skills in going into the system and writing programs to extract data and apply those skills to building a Web-based dashboard without having to learn how to create Web sites; without having to learn complex dashboard tools,” Luke Bucklin, president of Sierra Bravo, based in Bloomington, MN, told 5 Minute Briefing. “It is a very natural way for someone with a lot of Pick skill to take advantage of some newer technology.”
Although it takes a programmer with Pick experience to build widgets with Bravo Dashboard, the company states that these widgets are built using tools MultiValue programmers already know how to use. This allows programmers serving MultiValue-powered companies to create useful widgets in a cost-effective manner. Each dashboard widget is created in real-time so information displayed is always current.
According to the company, Bravo Dashboard is the first and only dashboard software solution to be offered free of charge. Unlike competitors, Bravo Dashboard can be shared by multiple users rather than being tied to a single paid licensee. Sierra Bravo will initially release the software for download for users of D3 and UniVerse on Unix, followed by the Windows implementations of those, with UniData and jBASE versions available after that, said Bucklin. All versions will be available for download on the Sierra Bravo site by year-end.
MultiValue-powered companies with no Pick programmer on staff can hire Sierra Bravo to install the free Bravo Dashboard software and begin writing programs to create data-driven portals. For more information, go here.
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Database Management Professionals in Hot Demand
Overall hiring in IT should remain solid in the first quarter of the year and database management professionals are among the most in demand, according to the Robert Half Technology IT Hiring Index and Skills Report, released earlier this month. The report is developed by Robert Half Technology, a leading provider of IT professionals and based on a survey conducted by an independent research group.
According to the report, 13 percent of CIOs plan to add information technology (IT) staff and three percent anticipate personnel reductions in the first quarter of 2008. The net 10 percent hiring increase compares with a net 12 percent increase projected last quarter. The majority of respondents, 82 percent, foresee no change in their staffing activity in the next three months.
The Hiring Index and Skills Report is based on interviews with more than 1,400 CIOs from a stratified random sample of U.S. companies with 100 or more employees. Database management professionals are third most in demand, according to the report, trailing only Windows administrators and network administrators. Twenty-seven percent of CIOs polled said business growth is the leading reason for expanding their IT departments. Increased need for customer and/or end-user support (20 percent), and the management of systems upgrades (19 percent) were also cited as leading factors. For more details from the report, go here.
Unisphere Research, our research arm, conducts proprietary research with leading IT user groups. To read abstracts of these studies, go here. Are you interested in having proprietary research conducted for your company about issues of concern to you? For more information, send an email to Tom@dbta.com.
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