IBM will manage hosted applications for Achieve Healthcare Technologies, which provides clinical and financial software systems to the eldercare industry. Last quarter, Achieve picked IBM to manage hosting for their end-to-end applications and improve reliability, flexibility and increase system access for its clients.

Achieve's business requires it to provide customers with continuous access to applications and services like Web-based tools that help reduce medical errors, falls and hospitalization rates, while increasing reimbursements and staff time with residents. Through its products and services, Achieve helps remedy long-term care challenges with electronic health records, point of care, enterprise reporting and IT services.

"Nearly 3,000 eldercare facilities around the country rely on us to manage everything from their financial management systems to their electronic medical records," said Mark Tomzak, Achieve's vice president of sales, marketing, alliances and professional services. "By having IBM manage many of our core electronic-business processes around hosting, we can further assure our customers that they will have uninterrupted access to their business-critical applications backed by the industrial strength of IBM."

With a staff of less than 200 people, Achieve strives to focus on software development and deployment. By partnering with IBM, Achieve gains the ability to focus on that core competency and can shift the responsibility of managing the different environments to IBM. The arrangement provides Achieve with:

• A flexible, scalable and reliable hosting environment to host both production and test environments;
• A phased approach to implementing Achieve's environment and data center consolidation on Achieve's four data centers migrating customers to IBM hosting environment;
• Extensive network, server, database, and application monitoring;
• Storage on demand and offsite tape storage for long term archiving.

Under the IBM services agreement, Achieve's applications will be hosted on IBM System x servers and will provide Achieve and their clients with increased security, data protection, availability and performance. In addition, Achieve can more easily grow their IT infrastructure on an as-needed basis without having to concern themselves with the costs associated with purchasing additional hardware and storage devices.