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With the accelerating pace of acquisitions and mergers and the resulting geographic distribution of existing and new users, organizations face monumental challenges in consolidating and migrating existing systems. Beyond this, organizations must be able to easily and cost-effectively support and train new users.
This OnWeb Web-to-Host application story in the Healthcare industry is an example of applying the power of NetManage solutions and professional services to solve real business problems.
This NetManage customer is the parent corporation of several previously-independent Blue Cross/Blue Shield organizations. These independent organizations used a variety of legacy terminal emulators on their desktops, with Attachmate as the dominant supplier of these emulators. The users were distributed across three states.
Reducing Costs through Standardization
To reduce desktop maintenance costs, the organization decided to standardize on one emulator. The NetManage Sales and Professional Services Teams became involved in this standardization process and offered not only a single-vendor solution, but also proposed a web-based approach. The primary justification for a web-based solution was to reduce deployment and maintenance costs.
The customer estimated that it cost between $250 and $300 each time an IT administrator had to "touch" a desktop. Touching is defined as installing a new version of software, installing a maintenance release, correcting a problem, etc. When the customer calculated the number of desktops (~2200) and the average requirement of two "touches" per year, the annual maintenance cost alone exceeded $1,100,000!
Full Functionality without Compromise
Because users were familiar with desktop based emulator capabilities such as macros, keyboard mapping, screen color, and file transfer, these became baseline decision criteria for any standardized solution. In addition, the web solution had to "look like" the old familiar IBM blue screen. Functionality couldn't be compromised. These legacy applications delivered complex screens with critical column-alignment requirements, cursor position sensing, and screen model changes on-the-fly (typically Mod 2 to Mod 5 and back).
Users also wanted the 4-screen capability of the old IBM 3290 plasma terminal. It was a useful tool in their desktop emulators and they considered it a strong plus if they could get the same capability in the web solution.
The NetManage teams knew that OnWeb Web-to-Host could deliver this capability and quickly turned this customer "want" into a "need".
Making the Right Decision
When this Healthcare organization evaluated the available web solutions that could meet these requirements and support this distributed user base, the list of suppliers quickly dwindled down to NetManage for our ability to execute and breadth of features and functionality. Attachmate was eliminated early due to the technical limitations of their host publishing system and the limited functionality of their server based solution.
Once the project was justified from a return on investment standpoint, the NetManage teams worked to understand the needs of representative users. During this assessment process several critical needs were identified - such as Color control, Screen Mod sensing, and keyboard mapping, as well as the 3290 plasma emulation capability.
These specific requirements dictated that functions must be performed on the client - HTML can't provide the same robust functionality. In fact, the customer tested and rejected HTML-only solutions, such as Attachmate.
The Critical Differences
The Multi-Frame capability was a strong differentiator between OnWeb Web-to-Host and other competitors - especially when the desktop is "zoomed" on a large flat panel monitor with 4 host screens displayed at once! The methodology offered by the competitive products was challenging to manage on hundreds of desktops and made it difficult to maintain screen positions on the desktops.
Other significant differentiators included OnWeb?s excellent redundancy and uptime for 2200 distributed users. Additionally, OnWeb?s Pro Controls will continue running even if the server that delivered them is down. When Open Connect's server component goes down, even at runtime, ALL of its clients go down.
In terms of overall strategy, OnWeb Web-to-Host provides the latest technologies, including ActiveX, Java, HTML, DHTML, XML, and ASP. Other competitors' strategies do not include these technologies and their architectures are not integrated in a credible fashion.
Return on Investment
The overall cost of this OnWeb system was approximately $390,000, which included 4 deployment servers and licenses for 2200 desktops. Simply comparing this initial cost to the annual maintenance costs of the desktop solution (~$1.1 Million), the payback period is a matter of months. Beyond that, ongoing savings achieved through centralized management and administration will continue to pay dividends.
OnWeb Web-to-Host was the right solution for this customer. This business problem is similar to many others - not just in Healthcare, but in other companies or industries that need to reduce administrative costs associated with operational consolidation resulting from mergers, acquisitions, or other business changes.
A nationwide Healthcare Corporation, addressing the challenge of merging previously-independent organizations.
As a result of implementing its NetManage OnWeb Web-to-Host solution, this major Healthcare Organization has:
- Simplified system consolidation
- Reduced software deployment and
maintenance costs significantly
- Maintained full host access
functionality in a web-to-host solution
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