How Cloudpaging Saves a Global Health Sciences Firm More Than $9.3M Annually

Mission: Managing Thousands of Applications for a Global User Base

Background

Our client is a leading enterprise global healthcare solutions provider with over 100,000 employees globally. Their employees needed access to any number of the thousands of applications utilized throughout the organization.

Application Virtualization Needed Relief

For the company’s IT department, installing, configuring, and managing applications in an environment of this scale is exceedingly difficult, compounded by the fact that many of organization’s products are highly regulated, increasing the need for compliance. Applications, which are often comprised of complex scientific software, must remain on the same version for the duration of a project, which may take years. During that time the employees may work on multiple projects, all requiring different applications. Managing conflicts, ensuring compliance, and controlling costs is a major issue.

Leadership decided to utilize Application Virtualization to deliver a large subset of applications. Applications that App-V could deliver worked well in the client’s environment, but App-V couldn’t virtualize all applications as several contained drivers or interacted with other applications on the system. Although App-V helped address some of the application management issues, there was still a significant portion left to be addressed.

Curing Application Issues

The client picked a subset of 50 applications that App-V could not deliver for a group of approximately 8,000 users, including Internet Explorer 9 with a specific JRE for a use with a legacy web application, Adobe Standard, Microsoft Excel 2010, and custom built scientific applications.

Each individual application was packaged with Numecent’s Cloudpaging Studio and uploaded to the organization’s internal application store, with even the most complicated applications taking less than a day. An internal survey was conducted with a subset of end users for these 50 applications and feedback was obtained about their experience. Most did not realize anything had changed but did notice that application conflicts and version control issues had been eliminated.

The success of the trial led our client to expand the use of Cloudpaging to several thousand users and several thousand applications, eventually becoming the standard for application delivery internally. App-V is still in use and coexists with Numecent Cloudpaging.

A Healthy Solution

An estimate of the savings can be seen in the table below:

Application Type	Cost to Package	Cloudpaging Packaging Time	App-V Packaging Time	Number of Applications Packaged Per Year	Average ROI Savings Utilizing Cloudpaging
Simple Applications (e.g., Browsers, productivity tools)	$100 per hour	1 – 2 hours per application	3 – 6 hours per application	250	$75K – $150K
Relatively Complex Applications (e.g., AutoCAD, Photoshop)	$100 per hour	2 – 4 hours per application	6 – 32 hours per application	1000	$300K – $4.4M
Highly Complex Applications (e.g., customized legacy applications)	$100 per hour	8 – 16 hours per application	40 – 320 hours per application	1000	$560K – $9.3M

Key Results

• Successfully delivered all applications in question
• Reduced application management and configuration issues
• Modernized application delivery mechanisms while supporting legacy systems
• Applications delivered to physical and virtual desktops anywhere
• ROI savings over $9.3 million per year

Conclusion

By adopting Cloudpaging as the standard for application delivery, the organization was able to overcome all their application management challenges, providing the ability to virtualize, isolate, and manage applications.

Applications that could not be delivered by other vendors were virtualized and delivered to end user desktops without issue, regardless of the desktop target, a physical system, a virtual desktop in the organization’s application repository, or located at one of the many campus locations.

IT staff members are now able to control application access and versions from a central location, eliminating conflicts for end users, guaranteeing project-based compliance, and increasing their productivity. Cloudpaging additionally assists staff with application management, providing the power to control user access, preconfigure software, and manage versions. Helpdesk tickets related to application issues has gone down significantly, further reducing costs. In all, the staff achieved savings of over $9.3 Million dollars per year just on packaging costs alone.