A group including Sun Microsystems Inc and Oracle Corp is locking horns with Digital Equipment Corp over a series of National Health Service contracts which could be worth UKP80m over the next three years. The contract involves offerings put together by the two teams that will handle the UK National Health Service’s messaging system. The contract is part of a deal won by Syntegra, the systems integration arm of British Telecommunications Plc. Both offerings will be put in a catalogue to be made available to Health Service hospitals; this catalogue will contain roughly 20 other vendors offering offerings or components. The Health Service, which sends out an estimated 1,000m paper memos a year, is said to use Oracle in 40% of its installations. The Oracle-Sun offering will consist of a SparcServer 1000 or SparcCentre 2000 server running X.400 software from OSIWare Ltd, and the IMX electronic data interchange software from Wick Hill Plc, Egham, Surrey. Oracle will use its Co-operative Development Environment product to help the system link into existing Health Service applications, which range from 20 year-old legacy systems to open systems boxes. DEC’s offering will use low end Alpha workstations with its Mailbus 400 Message Transfer Agent, Mailbus Message Store and DEC X500 Directory. DEC is also supplying the kit for the backbone of the messaging system. The pilot system consists of two Series 3000 Alpha machines, although this is likely to progress to 10 Sable servers later.
