Yesterday was the day of acquisition announcements: Sun intends to buy mysql and Oracle intends to buy BEA. And one way to look at is shows how both moves are related: companies engaged in middle ware are building out their LAMP stacks.
LAMP as Jonathan blogged yesterday w/o further explanation stands for Linux, Apache (as a placeholder for Apache's Tomcat app server), MySQL (as a placeholder for an RDMS) and PHP (as a placeholder for database to web middle ware). Sun now has a complete LAMP stack in open source: Open Solaris, Glassfish, MySQL and JDBC, while Oracle has a similar stack completely in a conventional proprietary license model.
In both cases developers and users will be able to get integrated products and professional support. The difference of the Sun stack is that we can optimize innovative technology to servers like our SPARC CMT, achieving mind blowing price performance. Do we need this in Healthcare? Absolutely!
Modern EMR applications, PHR's, and HIE all can be designed in a classical web tier architecture, as demonstrated by Tolven. Put Tolven on the Sun stack, which we are doing, actually, in our benchmark center right now, and you will see unprecedented price performance. We will be able to deliver EMR, practice management systems, e-prescribe solutions and so on in a SaaS delivery to millions of physicians at the fraction of the cost. Today, our Niagara servers are heavily taxed by Oracle because their performance is so good they charge licenses fees that easily quadruple the system price. With MySQL we can even improve performance and further lower cost per user. Entire Hospitals can run on a small blade center, including all their desktops. Sounds like Science Fiction? We'll show it to you at the upcoming HIMSS show.
So the bottom line for Health Care is that an open source LAMP stack from Sun will combine the best of two worlds: mission critical support (for a fee), which we need for production in health care, combined with the open and flexible data architecture of open source at zero license cost.
Watch this space for upcoming performance results on some open source stacks - you'll be amazed!
![[my boss] about public sector (Government, Education and Health care)](http://www.unitedfeatures.com/ufs/images/comics/characters/cast_dilbert_The_Boss_sm.gif)
