“Had we found a fit like Cloud400™ we would have migrated long ago. I would tell a friend they would be crazy to spend any money on new hardware…or write another check for IBM hardware or software maintenance.”
Background
Started in 1976, Intelligent Health Systems (IHS) is a hospital information system for facilities under 500 beds. In 1999, IHS started a transformation process to be a leading provider of clinical and patient management systems.
IHS CEO Brady Klick had already moved his Windows and Linux applications to a hosting service.
As IHS moved its products to all markets, the lessons learned at the community level continued to serve the growing company. One such advantage is the portability of patient records.
“Many times, a patient will be transferred from a community hospital to a larger facility for more intensive care,” Brady said. “With our clinical systems, we can send that information up to the regional facility and bring it down to the community level when they return home.”
Federal Regulations Phase Out Software
“We had developed hospital billing software that was supposed to have been phased out …like by October 2013, at the latest. That’s when everybody should have been off of it based on Federal regulations in healthcare billing.”
Aging IBM 9406-270 Hosts Customer Applications
“Then the Federal regulators delayed the phase out …then delayed it again. We had a couple of customers that just did not want to get off our applications. Our IBM 9406-270 was getting old. One customer in particular was hosted on our 9406-270 – they never had their own server.”
Customer Cannot Tolerate Downtime
“This customer got to the point where their needs outlived my residence in California – I moved back to Minnesota – and the life of our hardware. I did not feel comfortable with them continuing to be supported on our old tired 9206-270 server on a day-to-day basis. They were in a position that their business could not tolerate downtime.”
Replacing Power Supply Via Apple iPad FaceTime – Not Cool!
“While we never had downtime on our 9406-270 that impacted any customers, we did have a time when we had a power supply fail. I was in Minnesota at the time. Fortunately, my brother was in San Diego. I had him drive to the data center where the server was hosted. I walked him through the process of replacing a power supply…via face-time with an Apple iPad. He was not cool with that…but it worked.”
Box of Spare Parts – Just In Case
“Just in case there was a hardware failure, we kept a box of the parts most likely to fail – spare power supply, spare network card, spare hard drive, and few other spare components – the most likely things to crash. We kept them so if we needed them we wouldn’t have to wait to have them shipped to us.”
No More Overnight Plane Flights
“I had everything else migrated out of that data center except the 9406-270. That AS400 was the one thing that meant having to hop on an airplane overnight to San Diego if I had to fix the server. I had to do some searching.”
Data Center Without Expertise Doesn’t Provide Enough Security
“Our 9406-270 server was at a data center with redundant power and cooling, but no IBM AS400 expertise. If I can’t physically get there, we have to pay one of their employees to look at something. They will basically push a power button…and that’s about it. They did not know anything about the AS400. The situation did not provide us enough security to host customers.”
Search For Newer, More Reliable Hosting Center With IBM AS400 Expertise
“I wanted a way to host our applications where the hardware was newer and more reliable and where the data center had IBM AS400 expertise so we could continue to host our customers that still wanted to use our software.
“So, I did some searching one afternoon…that’s when I found Cloud400.”
Another Hosting Solution Not Interested Our “Vanilla” Needs
“We spoke to at least one more AS400 cloud hosting solution. I got the impression from them that unless you were running an application like JD Edwards, or some sort of a specific application, they would not get real competitive for just “vanilla” AS400 hosting. So, they fell out of contention pretty quickly.
“Finally, in February 2014 while searching on Google, I found Cloud400.”
Happy With Cloud400 Team
“We have been happy with everybody we worked with at Cloud400. Bob Kennedy seemed to know everything about the system and Cloud400. Everything got done that needed to be done as promised. I have been happy with everybody we have worked with.
“Bob Hall really knew Networking and connectivity. We found Darren Anderson was extremely knowledgeable and attentive. Darren really helped us and held our hand with the migration to Cloud400.”
Cutover To Cloud400 Handled In-House
“In fact, if anything, Darren was probably a little hurt because we did not call him for the actual cutover time. We had done a couple of dry runs before we had to, so we knew we could do it ourselves.
“We were well-prepped when it happened so the cutover went as well as it could have. Overall, it went relatively smooth. I am happy with everyone.”
Migration To Cloud400 – “Wish We’d Done This Years Ago”
“Having migrated to Cloud400, if I could have done it differently, I would have done it years ago. I just wish we had found Cloud400 earlier.
“If I had found an AS400 cloud hosting solution years earlier, I would have done it then. We moved all of our other Windows and Linux applications almost exclusively out to the Amazon cloud. We started that about 5 years ago. We were early on with this trend. We have not had any production applications we host ourselves for at least 3 years, except our AS400 application.”
Cloud400 Works Fine, As Expected
“Cloud400 works just fine – it’s an AS400. It’s supposed to work fine, right? That’s the magic about them. When it comes to reliability, the AS400 or Windows? …well, Windows has its issues …If Windows did not make development easier, I wonder if it would have gone anywhere. From a hosting standpoint you are still better off hosting applications on AS400 or Linux.”
No Differences In Operations – Except Applications Run Faster
“When we cut over to Cloud400, there were really no differences in operation…except we noticed our applications ran faster. And we have more disk space. We were running out of disk space on our 9406-270.
“It is just really like being on the same system. Our customers did not notice any difference.”
Finally Found The Fit
“Had we found a fit like Cloud400 we would have migrated long before we did.”
Brady Klick Recommends Cloud400
“I would recommend Cloud400 to a friend and I would tell them they would be crazy to spend any money on new hardware…or write another check for IBM hardware or software maintenance.
“With a solution like Cloud400 there is just no reason to do something crazy like that.”