November 2007 Newsletter

Preparing HARP for the Future

By: Vice President

The Quadax HARP development staff has been busy with some major initiatives to ensure the product’s viability well into the future. This past June, we completed migration of our internal HARP business from the MPE operating system to HP-UX. The results have been extremely positive! Our current HP-UX system with four processors is handling close to 75% more users than our MPE system with twelve processors, and batch processing is running in about half the time. Thus far the HP Integrity server has proven to be as reliable as the tried and true HPe3000, and the Eloquence database management system has been as dependable as TurboImage was on MPE. To the end users, HARP appears and functions the same on both operating systems; no retraining of users was necessary.

Customers still running HARP on their own HPe3000’s should seriously consider moving forward with migration to HP-UX in the near future. As the e3000 systems age, parts become less available, and support costs will continue to increase. Support for our HP Integrity server is a fraction of what we were paying for our MPE system. It will also become increasingly difficult to upgrade your system as your business grows. HP has extended limited support of the HPe3000 through the end of 2010, but please note that this support is limited. In HP’s words, “The primary intent of this change is to provide customers who are transitioning to new HP solutions with extra time for completing that transition. This announcement does not reflect a change in HP's continued strong recommendation that customers proceed with planning and implementing transitions off the e3000 as soon as possible.”

Now that our internal migration is complete, the HARP development staff has turned its focus to developing a browser-based version. This version will give HARP a fresh new look while still relying on the same proven billing concepts and business logic developed over the past 30 plus years. The browser-based version uses asynchronous programming techniques to minimize the inherent overhead of redisplaying a Web page and to preserve functionality available in the current character-based version. The browser environment also allows for much more flexibility to display information and to perform tasks with fewer keystrokes. A few core screens are being released to select customers in the coming weeks, and we expect most functionality to be available sometime in 2008.