I don't think it was real important. It's turned out to be beneficial, especially in the widget libraries and low-level code libraries to have that kind of access.
What about in helping you troubleshoot issues, such as the ones you mentioned?
Probably not so much. We've got some talented developers of our own. I'm sure there was help offered from the community, and I'm sure we took advantage of that; but I can't say it's a major part of our strategy or a major part of the benefit to us. You have to recognize we're application developers, so we're not cutting-edge with respect to the technologies we deploy. We're consumers of technologies others have built and successfully defended.
Are there any projects you've undertaken using open source technologies that couldn't have been implemented any other way -- from either a technical or practical perspective?
I don't think there's anything we couldn't have implemented from a technical perspective. But practically -- meaning within the same time or cost of delivery windows -- certainly. Open source has definitely improved our time to market in several key areas, and it's improved the cost of delivery in several key areas. So -- practically, yes; technically, no.
Do you have any metrics around what those improvements have been?
I've got three case studies we did of hospitals that either adopted some of our open source-based applications or replaced existing applications with the open source versions. There is a fairly good-sized hospital in New Hampshire that reduced its hardware and related licensing capital costs by two-thirds. Overall cost of ownership was reduced 60 percent in five years for apples-to-apples applications that it replaced with ours. The hospital also cited much easier expansion and upgrade capabilities.
A large hospital of almost 700 beds in Houston went with our solution on bladed open source servers running over Oracle RAC [Real Application Clusters] to deploy a physician portal. It reduced its hardware costs by one-third in a 300-concurrent-user environment -- where users are physicians -- with response times well under one second. A small hospital in Colorado got a 25 percent reduction in cost, improved response time with reports running twice as fast, and reported an increase in scalability.