3000 healthcare vendor breaks buyout, port news

Amisys announces June release of initial HP-UX port, company’s acquisition by old-line investment firm

HP 3000 customers using the Amisys healthcare application will be looking toward a new future using a vision from the vendor’s past, as the company announced its new HP-UX software for release as well as an acquisition by one of the oldest venture capital investment firms in the US.

Platinum Equity Partners sold Amisys LLC to Whitney & Co. for an undisclosed amount in late May. The new owners of the MPE software vendor have a investment heritage that started with founder Jock Whitney, a financier and philanthropist who was a partner in the making of the movie “Gone With the Wind.”

Amisys clients will see another star rise from a more glamorous era as well. Kevin Brown, the executive who led the company to a dominant position in the healthcare payor software market, is returning as president and CEO of the firm, which has been renamed Amisys Synertech.

A prime motivator for the sale of the company is the success it expects from the port of its application to HP-UX. Amisys officials say they hope to see implementation of the first release of Amisys Advance at three HP 3000 customer sites during 2003.

The newest version has emerged after a year of work alongside services firm Transoft (www.transoft.com), as well as Amisys’ in-house efforts from a team of 70 developers for the past 18 months. Another release, set for 2004, will be sold to new customers during 2005 on the strength of MPE customers’ success with the app.

Experienced investment, management

Whitney, an equity investment firm that’s been called a buyout company in Bloomberg reports, says that it started its venture capital business in the US in 1946 on the strength of a $5 million check from founder Jock Whitney. Whitney partner Steve Rogers said that the investors believe that “Health plans today are looking for superior product and strong technology, along with a service partner to helm then address their rapidly changing business environments.”

The Synertech end of the organization will be managing ASP-based customers who use the Amisys application. As a Business Process Outsourcer (BPO) Synertech will become the primary contact for relationships with Perot Systems and Infotrust, firms which sell administrative services to healthcare organizations.

Amisys Synertech chief operating officer Kathy McCarthy, who worked with Brown before he left the firm late in 1998, said she believes the company’s employees will welcome Brown’s return.

“Kevin has a lot of good ideas, he’s very visionary, and has a good handle on the industry,” McCarthy said. “He’s a good person for as we re-introduce Amisys to the market. Everybody here is very excited.”

Amisys will pursue new clients after its second version of Amisys Advance is released, looking for the first new business for the company in several years. A client base of more than 100 companies has been reduced to 65, plus a dozen using the ASP model provided by Perot Systems and Infotrust. But the new HP-UX offering hopes to attract new clients and offset the consolidation and closure of health plans that’s helped to reduce the company’s client base.

McCarthy said Whitney’s purchase of Amisys LLC “was solely based on the plans we have in place for Amisys Advance and the migration to the HP 9000. The growth potential was for that strategy.”

Brown was attempting to organize an investment group to purchase Amisys when McKessonHBOC was selling the ISV in 2001 to Platinum Equity. McCarthy said that Platinum started receiving offers for Amisys LLC late in 2001, and talks with Whitney began in earnest early this year.

The COO also said she expected Whitney’s level of investment in Amisys to exceed that of Platinum’s. “They invest in companies they plan to grow,” she said of Whitney. “They usually do less than five deals a year, and invest in companies with a growth potential and a strong management team in place.”

McCarthy added that she doesn’t expect widespread change in the Amisys management team, with the exception of bringing Brown on board. The new company head was meeting with his staff just after the deal was announced.

Transoft’s transformation

Whitney bought into the company’s strategy to shift its customer base to HP’s Unix platform, a project that’s meeting its first major deadline this month. The Amisys application is more than 3 million lines of code, a mixture of PowerHouse and COBOL that is now in its 11th major release under MPE.

One year ago Amisys announced it expected to have a first Unix port of the application ready in June, 2003. The company met the schedule for this first feature-for-feature port with the help of Transoft, a migration services company that employs specialized tools to move legacy code to new platforms.

McCarthy said the new owners of the company are committed to continuing investments to push another version of Amisys Advance into the HP 3000 customer base and beyond into new clients.

“They’re committed to give us the resources — monetary or people — to get this migration done in the timeframe,” McCarthy said. Transoft has been essential in moving batch processing and job management into the Unix environment, she added, as well as creating the first Oracle database schema.

“We did about half the work, and Transoft did the other half of the code. Transoft converted the COBOL and the jobs, and we converted the screens.”

The job conversion from the MPE environment has emerged as one of the more complex pieces of a port away from the HP 3000, according to customer reports. Transoft, using its Legacy Liberator software suite, converted the Amisys MPE-based jobs into Unix commands.

“Transoft’s been in the business of conversion for 20 years,” McCarthy said. “They’ve got tools for all this.” Amisys is recommending Transoft to healthcare clients as a resource to help convert surround code, the applications and programs customers have built around their main Amisys application.

Amisys got commented MicroFocus COBOL code out of Transoft’s Liberator, then went to work on converting the screens for the application from Cognos’ PowerHouse to the Cognos Axiant product. But Amisys is moving away from Cognos in the next release of Amisys Advance. That version of the app, which will be sold to new customers, will use Java for its Web-based interface. The conversion of the 1,500 Axiant screens in Amisys Advance will be done by CORE Migration (www.coremigration.com), an Ottawa-based firm that specializes in migrations away from Cognos products.

For this summer, however, Amisys is grateful to be on schedule with the initial Unix version of a complex MPE application. Outside help was essential to meeting deadlines.

“We couldn’t have done this on this timeframe without the tools that Transoft provided,” McCarthy said. “We built in very stringent deadlines and started with our hardest code. They delivered every item on time, or ahead of time.”

Transoft also did work on the Amisys database to move the data from IMAGE/SQL to Oracle, creating a schema for the new database. McCarthy said that the initial schema follows 90 percent of the design used in the HP 3000 version of the product. The final schema was approved by a set of customer advisors by December of last year.

“We made the changes where we had to for the SQL calls, but we didn’t go full-scale into a true Oracle configuration,” she said. “We’re doing this in steps.” Axis, a tool from Axiom Consulting (www.axiom-systems.com), was used by Amisys to move the data.