4-page Case Study - Posted 6/1/2007

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Clarian Health Partners

Speed application deployment and ensure reliable delivery of patches and updates

I've been exposed to hundreds of applications, and SoftGrid is one of the most compelling I have seen.  It does everything it promises to do. Ed Simcox Director of Technology Planning Clarian Health Partners

The Challenges

Clarian Health Partner’s IT department supports 350 applications on 12,000 PCs—including laptops and kiosks—for 15,000 clinicians and administrative staff. Users are spread among 124 locations, some in shopping malls where small doctors offices are located, others in dispersed hospital campuses. Managing applications for this diverse environment was very time-consuming and resource-intensive:

• Limited access for roaming users: Clarian’s clinicians often need to use specialized applications on PCs located in patient rooms. Getting access to these applications was hit or miss, however. For instance, a primary care physician doing rounds may need to view the radiology images of a patient’s broken leg. This required having a proprietary viewer for the radiology application loaded on the local PC. Oftentimes physicians installed these viewers themselves, cluttering the PC and causing conflicts with other viewers that were already installed for other software programs. It wasn’t unusual for this to result in problems with PC and application performance, leading the physicians to call the helpdesk to try to resolve it, or even walking to their own office—which could be 15-20 minutes away—to view the images there. Needless to say, this hindered the physicians’ productivity.
• Time-consuming application and update packaging: As a result of the merger that formed Clarian, the hospital had 7,800 applications—way too many to support. They scaled the number down to 350 with the hope that they could standardize the environment, more easily deploy applications and deliver a more reliable user experience. However, according to Director of Technology Planning Ed Simcox, “We found out that packaging applications is an art, not a science. It was time-consuming and required a multi-disciplinary effort.” Simcox estimates it took three to four weeks and cost about $3,500 in man-hours to package a single application. Updating operating systems was also extremely difficult. Simcox noted that “it was a Herculean effort” to update Microsoft Windows XP because, for instance, they had to test all key applications against the newly patched version of Office to check for conflicts. Clarian IT had to err on the side of not updating the OS as often as they would have liked because of this.
• PC recovery tedium: In the event of unplanned outages caused by downed PCs, getting users back online was an ad hoc, chaotic process. IT had to install all required applications on other PCs and tweak them for user preferences. “On a good day, it would take about one to four hours per PC, which adds up when there are so many people to support,” according to Simcox.

Clarian needed a way to vastly simplify roaming user support, speed new deployments and patches, and centralize application management so that IT didn’t have to physically visit PCs in order to support them.

Simcox learned about SoftGrid Application Virtualization during an emerging technology summit. “When I heard about SoftGrid it seemed to meet so many of our needs that I thought it was too good to be true,” he said. Before moving forward, he sent an IT staffer to a SoftGrid training where he could kick the tires and find out if there was an Achilles heel. His employee returned with nothing but positive feedback. Clarian purchased SoftGrid a few weeks later. “You won’t find anyone who is more skeptical about claims by software vendors than me. But all indications are that SoftGrid does exactly what it says it does,” Simcox added.

The Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization Solution

Microsoft SoftGrid Application Virtualization transforms applications into virtualized, network-available services, resulting in dynamic delivery of software that is never installed, never conflicts, and minimizes costly application compatibility testing. Users and their application environments are no longer machine-specific, and the machines themselves are no longer user-specific, enabling IT to be flexible and responsive to business needs, and significantly reducing the cost of PC management.

SoftGrid’s unique ability to virtualize all key components of any Windows application allows administrators to accelerate each step of the application management process by compressing the time necessary for packaging and preparing applications, deployment, patch management and updates, support and termination. Users automatically receive the latest application version the next time they log on to the network.

The virtualization of applications happens with the SoftGrid Sequencer, a wizard-based tool that packages Windows application for real-time streaming as network services. The Sequencer uses a once-per-application process to protect the application’s integrity and does not modify its source code. SoftGrid is an integral tool in the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack, a dynamic desktop solution that helps reduce application deployment costs, enable delivery of applications as services and better manage and control enterprise desktop environments.

The Results

Since deploying SoftGrid, Clarian has transformed the way it manages applications and is realizing tremendous savings:

• Anywhere access for roaming users: Users will be able to roam freely to any PC without worrying about whether they can access required applications. Now, when a physician needs to see a radiologist’s images, she will simply put the CD with the images in the PC and SoftGrid will pull down the correct viewer application. “Having universal access for our clinicians is huge,” said Simcox. “They get what they need right away without any problems and without any helpdesk support, which decreases client computing costs and increases customer satisfaction.”
• Accelerated deployments and updates: SoftGrid eliminates the need for extensive compatibility testing, enables applications to be assigned centrally through Active Directory, and automatically provides the newest version of authorized applications every time a user logs onto a PC. SoftGrid can enable Clarian to update their OS without any adverse affect because it isolates the OS from the applications. This also makes a substantial difference in the time and costs required to deploy new applications and updates. Instead of taking three to four weeks and costing $3,500/application, Simcox estimates that SoftGrid is cutting the time to just three days and the cost to just $500/application.
• Quick time-to-recovery: Recovery takes a fraction of the time and effort previously required. With SoftGrid, activating a new PC for a user whose PC is down takes just 5-10 minutes, instead of one to four hours. “I can take a PC, plug it into the network and as soon as the user logs on he’ll get all his functionality. We don’t have to install any applications and because user settings are preserved with SoftGrid, all user preferences are right there, too,” Simcox said. “To set up a DR center in Chicago all I need are available PCs. I can give full access to any user immediately.”

See For Yourself

To learn how Microsoft SoftGrid and the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack for Software Assurance can help you and for complete systems requirements, please visit http://www.windowsvista.com/optimizeddesktop