Medscheme, the independent medical schemes manager, has contracted Unisys Africa to deploy two ES7000 servers running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server from Novell.
Medscheme operates an Oracle database environment, which no longer ports its products to SCO UnixWare, a primary driver behind the project.
"The Oracle technology has met all of our requirements, but because it no longer supports SCO Unix, while our business must ensure customers still receive the best possible service, we have leveraged our investment in Unix skills and opted for the Linux operating system," says Kevin Wright, CIO at Medscheme.
As an independent medical schemes manager, Medscheme`s primary lines of business are claim processing and payment services, ensuring efficient healthcare funds spending that benefits medical schemes, integrating information on healthcare services provided to medical scheme beneficiaries on a collective and individual basis, and providing ongoing management information to medical scheme trustees.
Medscheme first bought ES7000 servers from Unisys Africa four years ago to provide the back-end systems and databases to handle claims processing for the one million lives covered by private organisations. Medscheme services 45% of the total market, processing one million claims per month with an assessing aggregate value of R500 million.
"The original systems served as the primary production and online transaction processing environment, also supporting business intelligence via the Oracle data warehouse and Oracle Financials," says Steven Grundlingh, Medscheme account manager at Unisys Africa.
Medscheme currently uses Oracle 8, and Unisys Africa will deploy two 16-processor ES7000 520s that use Intel`s 2.2GHz Xeon processors in support of a migration to Oracle 9. Several Oracle databases will run on the two machines, the largest of which is 1TB in size.
This project forms part of a business alignment and technology enhancement strategy developed by Kevin Wright, who is Medscheme`s new CIO. "We need to keep our systems in line with market developments, not only to ensure support availability but also to leverage new technologies being developed in the IT industry," says Wright. "Our partnership with Unisys began four years ago and we can now leverage the enhancements of the ES7000 range along with Unisys`s newly announced support for Linux as we migrate to newer versions of Oracle," says Wright.
Unisys Africa`s Grundlingh expects that the newer ES7000s with the Linux operating system, to be deployed at the very heart of the Medscheme data centre, will continue to provide Medscheme with the value, reliability and performance to which it has become accustomed.
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