Success Story: Mercy Health Services

Mercy Health Services replaced Novell ZENworks and several other point solutions with Altiris. They "believed in going with a fully integrated solution. Some companies buy 'best of breed' products and then try to tie them together. The cost to develop software linkages between individual products and maintain relationships with multiple companies creates an unpredictable cost structure."

The Challenge

• Using six point solutions to manage its environment; wanted to consolidate to a single comprehensive solution
• Rapid growth made it difficult to manage its expanding environment
• Needed the ability to manage distributed desktops remotely
• Primary imaging and software delivery application was bulky and slow

The Business Values

• Altiris helps Mercy consolidate six point solutions into a single integrated solution
• Altiris reduces amount of time needed to image and deploy machines making it much easier to keep up with rapid growth
• Altiris Helpdesk solution becomes the core of Mercy's system simplifying support, reducing time to fix machines, and increasing uptime and productivity
• Altiris is less invasive and doesn't require a bulky agent, resulting in quicker, more efficient machines for the end user

Dramatic Growth

In the last few years, Mercy Health Services has grown rapidly. The number of applications and diversity of end user computing was creating a more complex environment to support. At this time, Mercy didn't have a cohesive strategy and was using multiple point solutions to handle the management and support of those PCs, including BMC, Ghost, Novell ZENworks, Remedy, VNC, LANDesk, and Microsoft SUS.

Mercy wanted to combine all of these products into one solution. It narrowed the decision to two vendors, Altiris and CA because they both offered a broad solution that would allow the company to consolidate its desktop management processes. Another key factor was having an integrated help desk component. Mercy was using Remedy for its help desk, but in a limited fashion.

An Integrated Solution

Tim Mooney, Director of IT at Mercy, had previous experience with Altiris while working for an Altiris Platinum business partner and felt that Altiris offered all of the capability Mercy needed at the time and more.

After successfully deploying Altiris in one area of their environment, Mercy decided to roll it out company wide. The initial implementation included Altiris Client Management Suite and Altiris Service & Asset Management Suite. One of the biggest benefits they immediately liked was the integration. "In the past, we didn't have a fully integrated suite. Our help desk, application deployment, patch management, imaging, software and hardware inventories were all handled separately," said Jim Stalder, Mercy's CIO.

Mooney explained the reason for choosing Altiris: "We believed in selecting a solution backed by a company with a core focus in Lifecycle Management. We have found that with Altiris".

The ability to manage Mercy's IT from a single console was especially beneficial to the help desk team. All of the tools are available to troubleshoot application and operating system issues in a consistent fashion. The Mercy environment will continue to grow with more complex applications and the end user base will become more sophisticated. Creating an infrastructure for support using Altiris provides Mercy with a distinct advantage to keep the total cost of ownership for client computing at an optimal level.

Accurate Inventory

Altiris has also given Mercy the ability to track software licenses. Before they began using Altiris Service & Asset Management Suite, Mercy's inventory was an arduous, manual process. "With Altiris, and the software inventory management module, we can automatically report on software that has been installed, make sure we have an accurate license count, and make sure we maintain compliance with our software vendors," Stalder said. The ability to track inventories through a Web console has been especially helpful to Stalder because his goal has been to eliminate all paper-based and manual processes at Mercy.

Mercy also has plans to incorporate Altiris Barcode Solution with its inventory process in the near future. This will help Mercy keep better tabs on its IT hardware as well. Mercy will be tracking IT and non-IT assets, including computers, monitors, PDA's, and all of the medical equipment supported by the Clinical Engineering department.

Exciting Possibilities

Going forward, Mercy is eager to expand their use of Altiris Software Virtualization Solution. Mercy was an active participant in the beta group that tested SVS, and they feel SVS will be an excellent fit in their environment, which includes more than 200 different applications. "I believe SVS will allow us to be able to take on upgrades and version increases or patches a lot easier, smoother, and get them rolled out in a more timely fashion," Matt Giblin, Sr. Desktop Engineer, stated. To date, Mercy has successfully rolled out two critical applications with SVS on 30 machines and has plans to expand that rollout in the near future.

"I think SVS will have a pretty substantial impact on the industry. It will completely change the way applications are deployed," Stalder said.

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