Since its launch 60 years ago, the UK's National Health Service (NHS) has grown to become the world's largest publicly funded health service. The system provides comprehensive healthcare to all residents of the UK – more than 60 million people. With a budget of more than £90 billion, the NHS nationwide employs more than 1.5 million people, and on average 1 million patients use NHS services every 36 hours.
As one of Microsoft's largest and most important customers, the NHS has a central enterprise licensing arrangement with Microsoft that provides specific core Microsoft software products for all personal computers across all of NHS in England. In a bid to test how many of its 107 core applications would operate in the Vista environment, the Worcestershire NHS countywide IC&T service unit recently ran tests using App-DNA's AppTitude that found that over 90 per cent of applications could be compatible. The Worcestershire NHS worked with Microsoft and IT consultants Camwood to assess the compatibility of the healthcare community's applications with Vista and also the Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V) environment. Camwood's consultants turned to App-DNA's AppTitude solution to conduct the testing.
Paul Calway, client manager for Camwood, explains: "The toolkit provides detailed compatibility analysis including remediation information for each application. That enables us to see very quickly if an application is compatible with Vista and also whether or not it is a suitable candidate for virtualization." AppTitude can do in days what the IT department would spend months doing with manual tests.
"We were early adopters of Vista and wanted to go forward but we had heard horror stories so thought it would be extremely useful to have our software benchmarked like this," said says Pravin Mistry, IT services manager for Worcestershire NHS.
The initial results were alarming, with only 15 per cent of 107 core applications compatible with the vanilla 64-bit release of Window Vista. However, using AppTitude's binary level intelligence, Camwood's experienced consultants showed that adoption of a 32-bit release, with a number of OS updates, would improve things considerably: 87 per cent of the portfolio proved compatible. Another 8 per cent required further testing, but may prove to be compatible, taking the total potentially compatible to 95 per cent. When it came to Microsoft App-V, Camwood was able to show that with careful planning as much as 80 per cent of the portfolio could be sequenced for App-V. But without the attention to detail, up to 78 per cent could fail, making any migration costly and time consuming.
There was one other piece of good news from Camwood's assessment. Like any health community, Worcestershire NHS has a mixture of vendor supplied MSIs, legacy setup.exe scripts, batch and manual file copies. The tests showed that rationalizing these formats to either Windows Installer or App-V would lower the total cost of ownership and reduce the time, risk and cost of moving to Windows Vista.
"It is important to ensure the entire application portfolio is understood and the potential impact considered when planning an OS migration," says Calway. "This is where App-DNA's AppTitude solution comes into its own. The application intelligence gives you the ability to plan your application migration effectively." For Worcestershire NHS, armed with the AppTitude reports and Camwood's recommendations, there is now some hard diagnostic data to help make their OS migration and application management decisions for the future.
Keen to find out more? Visit the App-DNA's Application Migration Resource Store.