IBM yanks one away from .Net

Claiming to yank a .Net win away from Microsoft, IBM on Friday announced that Cerner, a large supplier of clinical and management information and knowledge systems, will now use IBM’s middleware products to deliver a range of health care services including patient information.

The company’s Cerner Millennium architecture will include WebSphere and DB2, to be shipped to 1,500 health care organizations with the Cerner Millennium release 2003 later this year, which will serve to unify disparate hospital information systems.

Cerner had been building solutions on Wintel-based servers and clients through 600 programmers who were using Microsoft’s Visual Basic and Visual Studio tools to create .Net exploitive applications.

Under the agreement, which is an expansion of an existing deal the two parties had, IBM’s eServer, storage and middleware products will be tweaked so as take full advantage of a range of Cerner solutions. Millennium will use WebSphere as its primary technology platform to unify development solutions. Officials from both companies also believe DB2 will help lower the total cost of ownership compared to the comparable Microsoft .Net solutions.

“More than anything we want to give hospitals the best ability to serve patients faster and with greater accuracy which ensures better quality of care and potentially help save lives. We think our solutions on the WebSphere platform provide the best opportunity to synchronize health care workflows for the benefit of patients,” said Trace Devanny, Cerner’s president.

The Millennium solutions are designed to run and link a wide range of core hospital functions including back office and emergency room functions, the surgery center to electronic versions of patient’s medical records. Cerner officials believe that WebSphere, because it is an open platform, will allow information to be shared more easily across all of those departments within the hospital.

At least one of Cerner’s health organizations sees good things coming from the expanded deal, particularly in the area of improved patient safety.

“We see some great benefits coming from the deal through the combined knowledge of the two companies. As patient safety continues to dominate concerns in health care, these types of alliances can enable health care organizations to manage the care process more effectively and affordably,” said Gary Jump, the CIO of Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, La.

Cerner now plans to standardize a new set of applications on not just WebSphere, but also on J2EE Web services. The company will also use IBM’s WebSphere Studio Application Developer as its development environment. This makes it easier for a wide range of programmers to develop in Java. IBM plans to create closer working ties between Cerner’s development organizations and its own WebSphere Studio product management team.

“Cerner did a lot of deep analysis on how to make their developers more productive and they found WebSphere Studio to be more productive in which to build applications. They told us they also needed a more open, cross-platform architecture, and they felt .Net would not support the heterogeneous needs of their customers,” said Scott Hebner, IBM’s vice president in charge of marketing for WebSphere in Somers, N.Y.

Hebner added that Cerner preferred WebSphere’s ability to cross integrate and unify patient care information, as well as the Web application servers’ ability to scale.

“They did not feel the thick client in .Net architecture could scale with the level of security and reliability that WebSphere could produce,” Hebner said.

Under the terms of the deal both companies will continue to coordinate and conduct marketing and sales efforts to healthcare organizations in the Americas , Europe, and Asian markets.