Thread regarding Allscripts layoffs

Microsoft has been developing and extending alliances for Azure for many years. There has been a concerted push since last year in healthcare. They are just throwing invites out to any and all software companies in hopes of increasing adoption into Azure. Some of the responses I have read imply allscripts , lost as it is, expects MS to retool/code the existing product lines. Azure is trying to keep pace with Amazon and Google. It is NOT and endorsement of the product lines being offered by Allscripts. Allscripts offerings will continue to flounder.. the leadership. Lack of vision and direction and skill sets, as well as the inbred arrogance will continue to destroy Allscripts brand. Azure is not your life line ..

@2lon+16aKMMeV - Please tell me what "cloud" is, I'd love to hear what you think it is I don't understand. Keep in mind that not only do I have nearly three decades of data center Operations experience from bottom to the top, deployed or managed more devices/machines than you've had meals, but also that I've heard nearly 1000 different definitions of what "Cloud" means ever since it became a buzzword 15 years ago and no two people have the same exact definition. The customer doesn't care if it's hosted at ATOS or QTS or Involta or AWS (not happening soon) or Azure - to the end-user perspective this is "in the Cloud". Period. Full Stop.

@3opt+16aKMMeV - You could make a counter-argument that the true "hack" is all of the evolutionary changes made to applications to make them more functional for Millennial Photo Sharing and Meme Generation and that the current model used is pretty much the way things have been done since Client/Server architecture (you could argue this back to Time-Sharing on mainframes if you want) became a thing. It's all the same thing in the end - compute and storage resources are not local to the end-user - aside from occasional rare latency issues it's irrelevant that the application is in a room on-site or 500 miles away from the customer.

With that said, I agree for the most part that it would be nice to be able to incorporate some of the evolved technologies into the Sunrise ecology - that's what I'm hoping Microsoft will be able to assist with. There are hurdles to something as monolithic, modular, and individually customized as Sunrise being converted into a mobile-phone app delivery service, both technical and regulatory.

The techniques you mention aren't unique to Azure. Microservices are part of the programming paradigm, and would be up to Development to see if shifting more in that direction would be more trouble than its worth. Continuous deployment is also more of a function of the software Development teams and a strategy rather than a "technology" - but I assure you that most customers would not be happy with constant change. We have enough trouble trying to keep them somewhere near Major Versions let alone CUs and hotfixes - although everything is light-years better on the Hosted side, because maintenance downtimes and application of updates is mandated (subject to scheduling agreements). Consider also that most customers have a fair degree of customization and a continuous deployment model assumes a homogeneous end-user base - the risk of any of the updates causing issues with a percentage of the customer base would be frankly pretty scary. Finally, "containers" - the one area I see this being useful would be on the client-delivery side, as Citrix/XenApp is pretty much ready to go with full Docker integration as well as Kubernetes. Azure supports both, and specifically has the "Azure Kubernetes Service". Simplifying and containerizing just this major component would greatly benefit the overall management of the systems involved.

There are other modern "cloud" technologies at Azure that are much more immediate and agreeable from the business end. The ability to spin-up/spin-down metered environments on a schedule, running low-priority environments on lower-tier resources, dynamic allocation of resources, dashboard access to all of the individual customers, the hands-off Disaster Recovery design, and a pile of other things all contribute to a much more stable, resilient, and (most importantly) cost-effective way of doing things. It's all about lowering the TCO, people.

The Azure stuff has been pretty much outside of my scope since they started tinkering with it about four or five years ago, but I've tried to keep pace with what this could do for us.

It is a hack in the sense that it is just a re-deployment of existing software that uses a client service model. A true cloud based application would require a redesign and rewrite to use micro services, containers, continuous deployment and other Azure based techniques.

To @2gzs+16aKMMeV, clearly you do not know what cloud means and how it’s operations are performed. Go get a cloud 101 to read during your bed time.

@2gzs+16aKMMeV - Obvious reading and comprehension issues. Sunrise has been "cloud based" for nearly two decades: Remote Hosting = "Cloud" for all intents and purposes the only difference with Azure is back-end management, deployment model, ability to have "dynamic" environments like non-Prod that shuts down and isn't metered for 8 hours a day if desired. The resource allocation and pricing models are different from traditional Hosted "Cloud" datacenter models. Overall, if they can hammer out some of the rough edges that exist, it's a much better space to be competing in and gives us unprecedented flexibility, agility, and resilience. Microsoft and Azure have an insane amount of resources behind them that virtually guarantee any failures on their part will be corrected quickly and smoothly. That's not cheerleading - those are plain simple facts.

No "hacking" required. None. It's already live with a number of customers and has been for a while. The challenge is getting Microsoft to scale up in a better fashion (scale out is great) and hammering out the inherent issues in Sunrise itself. Again, no "hacking" required - it works out of the box as expected.

What I'm reading out of this is that Microsoft is finally willing to put some real resources into helping us achieve our goals, and if Development gets some assistance more power to them. You all want to be negative or against anything with a hint of hope to it, it seems like you want to lose your jobs.

In other words, it's just a big "hack" so that AS can tell customers that it's "cloud based" and they can check off another item on the features checklist used to compare AS to other vendors.

That is what I heard too - just deployments of existing software. Allscripts has no capitals to spare for this adventure.

So, it's not a re-write of any software, just a re-deployment of the existing stuff on the cloud? Is that what I'm hearing?!

@1ccc+16aKMMeV - I get your tone, but I would rather see some kind of Alliance with Microsoft than not. Considering we have sold literally billions of dollars worth of Microsoft product for them over the years it's nice for them to finally pretend they're going to contribute something back and maybe expend some resources trying to help us out. Hey, if it doesn't work out maybe Microsoft can buy Allscripts because the other Health offerings they've had kind of s—ed and I'm sure there's parts and pieces they can use. Anyway, it's probably not going to help much, because the problems we face aren't problems with Microsoft but upper management being clueless and greedy. But I'd rather see something positive or potentially positive happen because the alternative is your and my reduced salary being reduced completely to zero dollars, and then we're not going to have anything to b–ch about anymore.

Maybe the person who posted this topic should, you know, actually read the press release - because there's nothing shocking or even mildly surprising about this. This ISN'T "AVENEL". I know I'm going to get shot down for saying something that will be perceived as positive toward Allscripts, but these are just bald facts:

It's Sunrise deployed via Microsoft Azure. Period. Full stop.

To be fair, this has already been happening for several years now mostly in the International space - there are a number of customers on Azure already. It's not really a significant change to anything, Sunrise has been successfully hosted in the "Cloud" ("Cloud Computing" for the non-technical simply means "someone else's computers somewhere else") for many years now at other Hosting providers. The only roadblock to deploying Sunrise to Azure has actually been that Microsoft Azure's model and resources simply didn't fit Sunrise requirements and administrative "root" access to those resources was not allowed so it couldn't be managed directly. Where it has been deployed, the product works as advertised.

It would be nice to see Microsoft help Development put effort into optimizing and streamlining wherever possible because quite frankly it would be wonderful to have that happen. The product works, but if we could lean it down a bit and make it efficient the marriage of that and the rapid-deploy/dynamic scaling capabilities of Azure would be very effective.

The extended strategic alliance sounds fantastic!  Clearly, everything must be fine again.  Thus I must ask this rhetorical question: why is my salary still in a reduced state and when exactly can I expect it to be reinstated?

So?

How appropriate to put vaporware in the cloud.