February 2004 Newsletter

Systems Bits

By: Gene Calai, VP of Information Services, Partner

HARP Transition

Quadax has officially started the formal research necessary to migrate our HARP software to other potential platforms and operating systems. An operating system is the software that runs a computer. The current operating system HARP runs on is called MPE/iX, and the computer is an HP e3000. The other operating systems that are being formally researched for HARP are Microsoft Windows® and Hewlett-Packard HP-UX. To be more specific on versions, we intend to thoroughly research Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 and Hewlett-Packard HP-UX 11. Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 runs on CPUs that are similar to the PCs that many of you have on your desktops. HP-UX 11 runs on HP 9000s with PA-RISC CPUs, just like the 3000, and the new Itanium® CPUs.

One of the reasons we first decided to use Speedware as our development platform was because it functions on multiple operating systems. We now intend to take advantage of our ability to migrate our source code to some of those other systems.

Why did we choose two operating systems? We would like to be able to allow our customers to have a choice depending on their preference of system architecture and operating system. In addition, we're looking for opportunities to scale the HARP product from relatively small installations up to very large and powerful environments, similar to the present operating environment of the Quadax internal computer operation.

For the new database, we are researching the feasibility and scalability of the Eloquence® database by Marxmeier Software AG. Eloquence is a database that has the ability to act just as a TurboImage database (our current database) and will allow us to migrate our programs with very few changes. It also presents a much more cost-effective alternative than some of the noteworthy national database products available.

We expect migration of code to be a relatively small part of the project. Most of the programming projects will include adapting for changes in operating system commands. Testing the programs will be a significant project. Assessing whether programs act the same on other operating systems and with the new database will be a significant challenge. Learning the other operating systems will also take some time. Finally, assessing the production readiness and packaging an end-user product both require substantial resource.

Overall this is a large project; however, it is manageable. We anticipate being in a position during the first quarter of 2005 to announce the conclusions that we reached during this massive R&D project.