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Computerworld - After using performance management software to improve batch-processing times for accounting and other functions, the WakeMed Health Network last week said it will be able to upgrade to a new mainframe this month for $850,000 less than it originally expected.
The not-for-profit health care company operates eight medical facilities that rely on an IBM mainframe and 240 distributed servers, all of which are managed with products from BMC Software Inc., said WakeMed CIO Steven Riney.
Raleigh, N.C.-based WakeMed has invested about $2 million in BMC's software since 2000, and it began to fully implement the technology when Riney joined the company in mid-2001. He said he thinks WakeMed has already gotten a return on its initial investment, especially because critical servers that support patient and emergency care have much less downtime than before.
"Two years ago, our IT systems were sick," Riney said. "The perception by staff was that systems were always down. We're well now. We have fewer people standing in line" with trouble reports.
Riney hasn't performed a formal ROI calculation except in two areas involving WakeMed's mainframe, which is monitored by BMC's Mainview Predict tool. WakeMed also uses BMC's Patrol for Unix Perform and Predict software to track about 40 Unix servers that are tied to the mainframe.
Both products were used to improve CPU performance at a time when overnight batch processing of accounting data was taking 15 hours to run, pushing into the next workday, Riney said. After the software helped show where the delays were occurring, WakeMed cut the time it takes to run the batch processes by about half late last year. That makes it possible to distribute billing information a day earlier, which is expected to save the company $600,000 annually, according to Riney.

WakeMed CIO Steven Riney

Because of the increased CPU efficiency, WakeMed's new mainframe won't need as much processing power as the one it has now. That will reduce both hardware and software costs for the new system, Riney added. The tab will total $1 million, compared with an original cost estimate of $1.85 million, he said.
WakeMed uses about 75 different BMC products, including tools that monitor individual servers and notify support technicians when they exceed set resource usage levels, Riney said.
With management software, "it's always hard to prove ROI," said Jean-Pierre Garbani, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. Garbani said he believes Riney's cost-avoidance calculation on the new mainframe but noted that the batch process time improvement "sounds spectacular."
Nonetheless, Garbani credits WakeMed for its ability touse the systems management software to coordinate its entire IT infrastructure. "It's one thing to have a bunch of information on systems and another thing to understand it," he said.
Riney said it took months for WakeMed's IT staff to properly tune management alerts on the company's servers so that technicians could be notified when repairs and fixes were necessary.
"We've learned that management software tools are complex, and there's no way around it," Riney said.

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