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System Z Lets University of Maryland Dental School Shine ______

From TI Mainframe to PC-Based LAN Network

What do you get when you mix 60,000 patients, 500 providers and 15 dental clinics with 80+ workstations and a 500 megabyte database? Chaos. Unless you know what you're doing!

Fortunately, the systems staff at the University of Maryland Dental School in Baltimore took the task of migration in bite-size chunks. And today, they're a gleaming example of how applications written in System Z can run serenely on a constantly changing Windows and Novell-based Local Area Network.

"Several years ago," recalls Systems Analyst Bob Robinson, "the dean of the dental school asked us to find a replacement to the COBOL applications software that kept track of and billed all the patients that visit our dental clinics. At the same time, it seemed like the opportune moment to replace our aging Texas Instruments 990."

"We had a very smooth rollover. We were pleasantly surprised to see that programs written in Z actually ran faster than our previous applications written in COBOL," Robinson notes. He continues, 'It's been an unbeatable combination for us. By migrating off a mainframe to a PC-based LAN, we achieved a 50% reduction in hardware costs. We also saved $20,000 a year in hardware maintenance charges alone. And because applications written in System Z can run small PC's, we probably saved $50,000 for added memory needed by many other languages."

As promised, the systems staff has also found System Z an easy development environment to use on a day-to-day basis.

Robinson boasts, "In essence, we've built the equivalent of a hospital information system in which we track all patient activity, all provider activity, and all the finances, "System Z has been a bona-fide solution to our needs. It's flexible, it's fast, and it's portable. It let us shine!"