Fall 2013
In collaboration with Intel®
Unleashing IT Seize innovation, accelerate business, drive outcomes.All through the cloud.
• Capital One: What’s in your API wallet?
• Symantec: Breaking private cloud molds
Opening new doorsPaul Kaczmarek, CIO of Red Door Spa, is exploring new services and applications to improve the guest experience. Page 8
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Strategies & Solutions
03 Capital One: What’s in your API wallet? How application programming interfaces (APIs) are helping the innovative bank “re-imagine the way customers interact with their money.”
05 Countering threats: People are your perimeter Creating a “human sensor network” to better identify, interpret, and act on emerging threats.
Experiences
06 When private clouds go big Symantec has created one of the largest private clouds on record, and eliminated more than 213 years of lab administration time as a result.
08 Relax, IT has it covered Red Door Spa is utilizing advanced technologies to balance a high-volume business with a service-oriented philosophy.
10 Increased collaboration at the heart of Dignity Health’s transformation The fifth largest hospital network in the U.S., Dignity Health is using collaboration technologies to improve clinical efficiency and patient care.
12 Putting medical software in the cloud Why Park Place International views the cloud as a natural and seamless extension of its onsite infrastructure, integration, and support services.
13 Transforming education delivery The Abu Dhabi Education Council is working to establish one of the five best public education systems in the world.
14 Forging meaningful relationships in healthcare How Alegent Creighton Health is becoming more proactive in an inherently reactive industry.
Cover: Paul Kaczmarek, CIO, Red Door Spa
Unleashing IT Seize innovation, accelerate business, drive outcomes.All through the cloud.Fall 2013
Industry game changersBusiness is often compared to sport. There is fierce competition. There are clear winners and losers. And there are countless others who occupy the middle ground, continually working to elevate their standing. While the vast majority of these companies play the game as it has always been played, a select few are bringing new methods, ideas, and strategies to the pitch.
This edition of Unleashing IT highlights some true innovators in our midst, the organizations that are changing the game and the fields on which it is played.
Capital One, for example, is exploring non-traditional channels to reach new markets and create new digital experiences for its customers (page 3). Symantec has built one of the biggest private clouds on record and placed $26 million in engineering expertise back on the playing field (page 6). And Alegent Creighton Health is working to become more proactive in an inherently reactive industry (page 14).
These are the organizations that are truly unleashing their IT. They are redefining the sport of business, and in doing so, forcing others to reevaluate their game plans. To this we say: Play on!
For more information, follow the links inside or contact Cisco at 1-800-553-6387 and select option 1 to speak with a Cisco representative. We welcome your feedback on the articles in this publication at www.UnleashingIT.com
Sincerely,
Giuliano Di Vitantonio Vice President Cisco Systems, Inc.
Shannon Poulin Vice President Intel Corporation
In collaboration with Intel®
3Seize innovation, accelerate business, drive outcomes. All through the cloud.
Strategies & Solutions
Banking has traditionally been conducted at branch locations, but Capital One is anything but traditional. The financial titan is actively working to “re-imagine the way customers interact with their money.”
“In a digital world, you can’t expect customers to always come to you,” says Joshua Greenough, Senior Director of Technology Innovations at Capital One. “You need to go where they are conducting business.”
That’s one of the primary goals of Capital One Labs, the innovation engine of an innovative bank. And the latest fuel for the engine has been APIs, which allow developers to create new programs and services that connect to and extend existing applications.
“We’ve been exploring non-traditional channels for a couple years,” says Skip Potter, Vice President of Technology Innovations at Capital One. “APIs are very interesting because they allow us to create new digital experiences that are horizontal across all of our service areas, from banking to credit cards to lending. They are a catalyst for change; not just for our customers, but for us and how we do business.”
Learning on the fly
While the approach may be novel, the goals are conventional: reach new markets and expand the distribution and adoption of Capital One’s services. In spring 2013, the company launched two APIs that extend the reach and value of its loyalty programs. The Digital Deals
How application programming interfaces (APIs) are helping the innovative bank “refresh and unlock” its potential.
Capital One: What’s in your API wallet?
Unleashing IT4
API helps Capital One affiliates earn money by delivering personalized deals to the right customer at the right time. The Rewards API allows customers to “pay with points” on certain websites and applications.
Both were developed using API management technologies from Mashery, an Intel® company. The Mashery platform enables PCI-compliant, cloud-based global delivery of APIs. This kind of built-in regulatory compliance across APIs can help facilitate integration between finance and retail partners such as Capital One and its affiliates.
“We wanted to find areas where we could add value in the marketplace, without impacting our core services or programs,” Greenough explains. “APIs are very new for us, for our partners, and for our customers, so we wanted to crawl before we walk and run. Starting with our loyalty programs gave us a chance to test, explore, and learn.”
A number of Capital One affiliates are already utilizing the APIs. With the first two a resounding success, the bank is working
to incorporate additional partners and bring new APIs to market.
“We developed the first two APIs ourselves, but the greatest value will come when we allow our partners to iterate and improve them,” says Potter. “Our partners are often closest to the customer, and know how to enhance the customer experience within their channel or application environment.”
Internal momentum building
In addition to positive partner and customer adoption, Capital One is experiencing a “surprising” amount of internal momentum surrounding its API development and initiatives.
“This stuff is brand new, and we’re in an entrenched industry. That said, there has been an unexpectedly high level of energy and interest internally,” says Greenough. “Our business groups have seen the value and are asking for more. It’s safe to say APIs are pushing the envelope for us, throughout the company.”
While the current APIs are focused on consumers and shopping experiences,
Potter sees a tremendous opportunity to use APIs in support of Capital One’s small business and commercial customers.
“We think APIs can help us integrate our services with ERP, payroll, and financial applications in ways that help small and medium companies run their business,” he says. “And we can do it quickly. It only takes a few months to get a new API to market and let our customers start using it. Then we can learn from it, improve it, and leverage it in new ways.”
“In the beginning, all of this was theoretical and aspirational, but it’s quickly becoming reality,” Greenough adds. “APIs are helping us take a fresh look at banking and unlock the potential of this promising technology.”
API management
To learn more about Mashery’s API management platform, see a demonstration at: www.UnleashingIT.com/API
5Seize innovation, accelerate business, drive outcomes. All through the cloud.
Too much information is hard to digest. Especially when your role is incident response and you’re called on to provide an informed risk assessment for the latest security threat. With terabytes of data to sift through, a significant amount of resource and time is required and that’s a daunting task for many organizations.
So how do you improve your ability to sense, interpret, and act on emerging threats? By engaging the one resource you already have: people.
“If you don’t have people focused on threat analysis and leveraging interested parties—both inside and outside your organization—then you’re leaving yourself vulnerable,” says Jerry Dixon, Director of Incident Response, Cisco. “Technical infrastructure only gets you so far. You need to get the right threat intelligence to the right groups, creating a human sensor network where everyone in the company has a role to play in information security.”
Both Cisco and Intel are already capitalizing on this novel approach. Intel’s Threat Agent Group and Emerging Threat Analysis forum are collaborative groups within Intel open to anyone passionate about security. The groups consist of professionals from varied backgrounds, including manufacturing, product development, legal, human resources, and information security. Their collective insight is coupled with outsight—connections to outside groups and industry peers—to act on emerging threats in a manner that is deemed appropriate to Intel.
Cisco has similar efforts in place to foster ongoing dialogue between product, security, and incident response teams across its organization. Together they maintain a pulse on emerging threat data and occasionally hold threat summits with external groups, including the research community and industry partners. They also host targeted awareness campaigns internally to ensure every Cisco employee is cognizant of the latest threats and correct response actions.
“A human sensor network is like a funnel,” explains Malcolm Harkins, Vice President and Chief Security and Privacy Officer, Intel. “You begin by establishing collaborative groups, then funnel the information they collect into an interpretation or triage exercise, and ultimately push it back out across your company as an informed risk action.”
The approach has proven itself at both Cisco and Intel through swift analysis of emerging threats like Stuxnet, quick response to attacks from undisclosed third parties, and increased alertness in general. It also enables security budgets to be directed toward efforts that matter most.
“People build intelligence,” says Dixon. “Nothing coming in the door is intelligence. It’s only after our folks put our context on it that it becomes intelligence. That’s the difference between the sky is falling every patch Tuesday versus here’s a threat we have to care about and why.”
How Cisco and Intel are harnessing the collaborative power of people to deliver intelligent threat analysis and response across their organizations, products, and services.
Countering threats: People are your perimeter
Strategies & Solutions
Getting StartedBuilding a human sensor network requires C-level support from the start. According to Malcolm Harkins, Vice President and Chief Security and Privacy Officer, Intel, best practices include:
• People don’t need ‘information security’ in their titles to be valuable contributors to the sensor network. Pulling together those who are passionate about cyber security, regardless of their day job, adds mind power and eyes to contend with rapidly emerging threats that might otherwise be missed.
• Demonstrate the connection between enterprise risk and technology risk. Proper management of risks such as food safety or patient safety, for example, is dependent on the integrity of underlying systems and control processes.
• Encourage tolerance in your management framework to allow information sharing with trusted peers.
• Clearly articulate rules of engagement for information sharing that include privacy controls, oversight, and governance.
Complimentary book
For a complimentary book, “Managing Risk and Information Security, Protect to Enable,” available in limited quantities, visit: www.UnleashingIT.com
Unleashing IT6
CIO Eric Slavinsky works with Cisco and LG&E and KU operations personnel to drive change
When private clouds go big
Symantec has eliminated more than 213 years of lab administration time in the last 18 months by consolidating on a massively scalable, “Mega FlexPod” platform.
Imagine eliminating more than 213 years—11,099 workweeks—of administration time from your organization in an 18-month span. Now imagine what could be accomplished when that time, representing $26 million worth of personnel, is reinvested in the business.
What may seem like pure fantasy has actually been accomplished by Symantec. And the $6.9 billion leader in information security and management has done so with one of the largest private clouds on record.
“We’ve definitely pushed some boundaries and broken some molds on what have previously been touted as the biggest private clouds in the industry,” says Jon Sanchez, director of Global Symantec Labs (GSL).
That wasn’t the original plan. Initially, Symantec simply wanted to bring together the technology resources sustaining 25 customer support labs, which are tasked with replicating and resolving customer problems.
“Every lab was using its own servers. It was a purchasing nightmare, there was competition for budgets, and we were wasting a lot of storage and compute resources,” Sanchez explains. “And our TSEs [technical support engineers] were spending too much time administering their own lab kits. They had to install the OS, the network, the Exchange environment, everything. We did the math on the time being spent, and it was the equivalent of 45 to 50 full-time employees.”
Through consolidation and virtualization, Sanchez knew he could help the customer support labs become more efficient and cost-effective. But he didn’t want to just give them virtual machines (VMs). He wanted to give them fully realized, software-defined data centers. In 20 minutes or less.
Engineering groups catch on
Rumors of a new GSL cloud spread like wildfire within Symantec. Engineering,
Experiences
Jon Sanchez, Director of Global Symantec Labs, has built a massive private cloud that delivers remarkable time and cost savings
7Seize innovation, accelerate business, drive outcomes. All through the cloud.
(From left) Senior Systems Analyst Bryon Fowler, Network Analyst Mark Davis, CIO Jeff Brooks, and Senior IT Manager Kim Sanders bring resiliency and flexibility to Muscogee (Creek) Nation Casinos
quality assurance, development, and even education services teams heard about the customer support labs’ ability to spin up software-defined data centers in a matter of minutes. And they wanted in on the action.
Sanchez suddenly had a scalability problem on his hands. Symantec has 600 labs worldwide. Giving all of them the amount of lab resources they need through a private cloud would be a herculean task.
“We tried with another vendor’s gear, but we broke it,” Sanchez reveals. “It couldn’t handle our scale. So we turned to the FlexPod platform, and even then, we had to stretch the typical architecture.”
Using the Intel® Xeon® processor-based Cisco® Unified Computing System™, Cisco Nexus® switches, and NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP storage, Symantec built what is being called a “Mega FlexPod.” Instead of a collection of “pods” that are loosely patched together, it acts as one, seamless system with a single VMware vCloud instance.
“With the ‘Mega FlexPod,’ we have virtually unlimited scalability,” says Sanchez. “We can deploy more than a thousand nodes and hundreds of thousands of VMs.”
And that means nearly all of Symantec’s 600 labs around the world will eventually be utilizing the GSL cloud. What started with 250 users in the customer support organization has grown to 3600 users spanning a variety of labs, and more are being onboarded every month.
Massive time and cost savings
Fueled by the “Mega FlexPod,” the GSL cloud can deliver a fully functional, software-defined data center in as little as 15 minutes, with everything needed for a lab kit, from compute and storage resources to network, OS, and Exchange environments. In the past, a similar setup would have taken up to two days to assemble.
Symantec will save an estimated $15 million over the next five years in hardware and data center costs alone. And what used to cost $2,000 annually per TSE for a limited amount of IT resources now costs $400 per TSE for unlimited resources. But the real value comes in time savings, and how that time is being reapplied.
“Our labs have 250 to 300 engineers, many of them working on quality assurance, development, and lab administration,” Sanchez notes. “By reducing the time it
takes to set up lab kits, we can reallocate 75 to 80 percent of those resources to higher value activities. That’s $26 million in headcount that is being transitioned from lab administration to fixing bugs, developing better products, and spending more time with our customers.”
Symantec’s labs are also becoming more efficient and working as a combined team instead of a loose collection of disparate groups.
“We have vaporized our silos,” Sanchez says. “In the past, one team would find a bug and then toss it over the fence to another team, who then had to work to recreate it. Today, a TSE can just send over the replicated environment. The labs are working more collaboratively, which makes them faster and more effective.”
Control public cloud costs and risks
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With a massive private cloud, the Global Symantec Labs team has “vaporized” operational silos
Unleashing IT8
Red Door Spa CIO Paul Kaczmarek with Corporate Office Manager Yvonne Taylor and Senior Systems Administrator Scott Dillingham (left) and Guest Service Manager Casey Moore (right)
How Red Door Spa is balancing a high-volume business with a service-oriented philosophy.
When you go to a spa, you want stress relief. You want relaxation. And you want to escape the taxing minutiae of everyday life. Long lines and extended wait times are not a part of the equation.
“An afternoon of relaxation can be completely undone by a frustrating checkout experience,” says Paul Kaczmarek, CIO of Red Door Spa. “And we can’t have that.”
Red Door Spa is built on personal pampering. With 50 luxury spas and hair salons indulging thousands of guests every day, the company must balance a high-volume business with a service-oriented philosophy.
“Our customers expect leisure and personal attention,” Kaczmarek says. “Technology must enable the guest experience, not get in the way.”
Unfortunately, Red Door Spa’s former IT infrastructure was getting in the way. Scheduling and point-of-sale (POS) applications—the backbones of any day spa—were slow. And a hodgepodge of
underutilized servers made it difficult to maintain current services, let alone deploy new ones.
“With upwards of 10,000 guests per day across all of our locations,” says Kaczmarek, “improving screen loading or transaction times by five or six seconds can make a huge difference.”
Consolidation, virtualization deliver speed, cost efficiency
Before application performance could be improved and new services deployed, Red Door Spa needed to update its technology infrastructure. NextNet Partners, a leading technology services firm, suggested the company look into the Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS), which is based on Intel® Xeon® processors.
“We never thought of Cisco as a server provider,” Kaczmarek admits. “But we compared [Cisco] UCS to our former server environment, and the choice was clear. We’ve pretty much replaced
Relax, IT has it covered Experiences
9Seize innovation, accelerate business, drive outcomes. All through the cloud.
everything with Cisco gear since then.”
The transition to Cisco UCS™ has effectively consolidated and virtualized Red Door Spa’s technology infrastructure, reducing costs, improving systems management, and easing the move to a colocation facility.
“We moved our company headquarters and avoided $250,000 by not building a new data center,” Kaczmarek says. “Because we had already transitioned to [Cisco] UCS, we only had to move two racks instead of seven. And with the help of NextNet Partners, we did it overnight and were never offline during business hours.”
Most importantly, he adds, everything is now faster. Bi-weekly payroll processing takes two hours instead of 14. And backing up mission-critical systems takes one hour instead of 12.
Red Door Spa recently upgraded its SAP and Cisco Unified Communications (UC) systems. In the past, such efforts would have necessitated new hardware and storage resources and taken weeks to order, implement, and configure. Now
the company can just spin up new virtual machines in a matter of hours.
Exploring new services
With a virtualized, highly flexible technology foundation, Red Door Spa is now in the process of exploring new services and applications for its retail locations. The company is already using tablets to improve the check-in and checkout experience.
“If our associates can check a customer in using a tablet while walking them to a room, we can remove the frustration of waiting in line,” Kaczmarek explains. “We can also use that as an opportunity to ask questions, learn more about each customer, and enter the information into our CRM system in real time.”
Customer insights lead to better, more personalized experiences and promotions, he adds. It’s why Red Door Spa is also exploring ways to link islands of information—including skin analysis and makeup stations—with its CRM system.
“In the past, adding a new application or interface would require new servers and
more storage, and come with questions about how we would connect it to our existing environment,” Kaczmarek says. “We don’t have those concerns or questions anymore.”
What started as a pure consolidation and virtualization project has opened up a host of ideas and opportunities. And it’s led to a more relaxed atmosphere, for Red Door Spa guests and its IT staff.
“My team was afraid of the transition at first because they were so used to our old systems. But they absolutely love our new infrastructure,” says Kaczmarek. “Moving to [Cisco] UCS was one of the best decisions we’ve made in the past nine years.”
Workshop: Accelerate your cloud journey
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The iconic red door has welcomed guests since day spa pioneer, Elizabeth Arden, opened her first spa location in 1910
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The 300-site hospital network is undergoing a massive technology shift in an effort to enhance unified communications, electronic health records, and patient-centric care.
Dignity Health is going through big changes. It has already seen extensive growth over the past few years, a recent name change (from Catholic Healthcare West), and is now in the process of upgrading its technology infrastructure and Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system to offer better collaboration and integrated, patient-centric care. This
is especially critical due to growing governmental healthcare mandates. As the fifth largest hospital network in the U.S., which delivers services across 17 states, 41 acute care hospitals, and 300 care sites, and employs about 60,000 people, this is no small task.
The organization is working with Cisco and World Wide Technology (WWT) to consolidate disparate systems and upgrade all sites to a modern networking and wireless infrastructure. The ultimate goals are to facilitate better communication and collaboration among business and clinical users, improve efficiencies, and drive down the rising cost of patient care. Two important ingredients in Dignity Health’s multi-year, cross-team communications improvements are its adoption of the Cisco WebEx® Meetings collaboration
Increased collaboration at the heart of Dignity Health’s transformation
Experiences
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platform and its rollout of Cisco JabberTM
instant messaging software.
Doing more with less
“As with any large organization, we are expecting growth over the next few years, but we are also in an industry where we are being asked to do more with less,” says Ash Shehata, Senior Director of Enterprise IT Operations at Dignity Health. “In a very paper-based industry, we are looking to streamline the process and maximize the returns by leveraging technology.”
According to Shehata, the organization is looking to expand its operations and individual clinic business by another 30 percent in the next two to three years. Due to growth from hospital and clinic acquisitions, Dignity Health already has a severe mismatch of unified communications (UC) and PBX systems.
In addition, prior to the infrastructure upgrade, about 80 percent of the facilities had no wireless networks. But since the implementation, the organization is moving rapidly from that environment to “an
extremely clinical-dense” Voice over IP (VoIP) wireless infrastructure that is able to deliver data directly to clinicians at their patients’ bedsides.
Moving toward Electronic Health Records
The main reason a stronger, more integrated network is necessary for the success of Dignity Health’s enhanced collaboration vision lies with the organization’s $1.8 billion electronic health record (EHR) program where Shehata is responsible for infrastructure upgrades.
“We are going from hospital to hospital and delivering a complete technology refresh. We are rebranding and re-implementing our local area and wide area networks, and implementing wireless—and it’s all Cisco infrastructures,” Shehata says.
To date, Dignity Health is about a third of the way through implementing the new networks at all the care sites—more than a dozen hospitals and 100 clinics so far—and is already seeing positive changes in both productivity and the meaningful use of data, according to Shehata.
“The data that we have been able to collect has enabled us to deliver just-in-time, consistent patient care,” he says. “Just as important is the connectivity from a physician’s perspective. We have been able to demonstrate and give them seamless access to patient data in an anywhere-anytime secure fashion. We’ve never been able to do that before.”
Business and patient care improvements
Laura Young, Vice President of IT Clinical Improvement at Dignity Health, said success of the project, from a business perspective, was built on three criteria: how people adopt the technology; if the technology works as intended; and if the hospital has been kept financially viable. According to Young, the project has been successful on all three fronts.
“One of the really important lessons learned early on is that the clinicians need to be using the system, and be part of the implementation and activation process, so that it is not just seen as something being done by IT,” she says.
“We are going hospital to hospital and delivering a complete technology refresh.” Ash Shehata, Senior Director of Enterprise IT Operations, Dignity Health
Unleashing IT12
“From a financial perspective, the hospitals have been able to generate significant revenue on a weekly basis through being able to track workflow or other billing options that weren’t achievable before,” Young says. “For example, maybe before a nurse couldn’t document her observation time. Or maybe it was just easier to ignore charging a peripheral, an IV bag, or something along those lines. And so there was revenue that was lost.”
And according to Dr. Elise Dempsey, Vice President of Clinical Informatics at Dignity Health, there is a noticeable increase in throughput as a result of the new
technology. This translates into a better patient experience, she says, because it minimizes delays. And because the data is stored centrally and is available wirelessly in real time, it allows clinicians to access it whenever they need it.
“Patients know when the nurse takes their history and notes it in their records, that the data will be available for all their care providers and they won’t get asked the same questions over and over again,” Dempsey says. The new system also enables them to give patients more detailed, consolidated information about their care.
“You want to make sure that you send patients home with information they can look at later,” says Dempsey. “We spend significant time making sure patients have all the education they need to be able to take care of themselves, and get well more quickly.”
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Many healthcare providers rely on MEDITECH software to facilitate electronic health records (EHRs) and other integrated care activities. As modern health requirements have become more complex and demanding, so too has the software that supports them.
“A 200-bed community healthcare provider may need as many as 50 servers and five terabytes or more of data, managed to strict performance tolerances, to run a full MEDITECH environment,” says Jim Fitzgerald, Executive Vice President of Park Place International, a leading provider of MEDITECH-based solutions and support. “Healthcare organizations typically don’t have the capital or human resources to build and maintain that type of technology infrastructure.”
To solve this problem, Park Place is now offering its solutions and services in both dedicated and hybrid cloud environments. The company’s OpSus Cloud Services provide Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) hosting and disaster recovery as well as remote support, management, archiving, and business analytics for MEDITECH users. Park Place executives view the cloud as a natural and seamless
extension of its on-site infrastructure, integration, and support services.
“We’re giving the user community a tremendous amount of choice,” says Mark Middleton, Vice President of OpSus Cloud Services at Park Place. “From infrastructure configuration and administration to application management and support, we can do it all, on-site or in the cloud.”
In becoming a comprehensive cloud services provider, Park Place leaned heavily on Cisco’s technology underpinnings and cloud expertise. The company purpose-built its data center to host MEDITECH solutions, utilizing the Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS), which is based on Intel® Xeon® processors, and Cisco Nexus® 5000 and 2000 switches.
“With a unified infrastructure and centralized administration, we can quickly manage all of our cloud services from one place,” says Brian Nelson, Senior Engineer at Park Place. “It’s tremendously flexible, which enables us to align our service offerings with our customers’ design requirements.”
This flexibility means Park Place can deliver hybrid solutions, Fitzgerald explains, that make use of customers’ on-site technology resources in tandem with OpSus cloud offerings.
“It used to be an all-or-nothing proposition: everything in the cloud or everything on-site,” says Fitzgerald. “That’s not always realistic, especially for organizations that want to take advantage of the cloud but have a lot invested in their data center. We have expertise and services that span both, and can deliver hybrid solutions that are tailored to a customer’s technology requirements, business objectives, and operational needs.”
More information
Park Place International helps customers create a multi-year, strategic technology plan, incorporating the best of private cloud, public cloud, and on-site solutions. For more information, contact [email protected] or visit: www.parkplaceintl.com
Putting medical software in the cloud
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Abu Dhabi, the political, cultural, and industrial center of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has a vision: Establish one of the five best public education systems in the world. Key to this vision is the Abu Dhabi Education Council (ADEC), which develops and implements educational policies, plans, and programs in accordance with national development goals.
More specifically, ADEC is tasked with developing world-class learners, students who are prepared and able to contribute to a sustainable, knowledge-based society. And the organization is doing so through the use of technology.
“In the past, our education system relied on a traditional classroom, pedagogy, and methodology in terms of delivering content and executing business processes,” says Mohammad Younes, Division Manager of Information and Communications Technology for ADEC. “Our goal was to introduce change gradually and create a new, technology-driven education model. We had to pursue transformation in three key pillars: Physical infrastructure, IT infrastructure, and business applications.”
Infrastructure upgrades
ADEC targeted all of Abu Dhabi’s 269 public schools for infrastructure and application upgrades, leveraging the expertise of Cisco® Advanced Services to meet its aggressive scale and timeframe requirements.
The first phase comprised cabling and switching for an advanced network that offers both wired and wireless connectivity within the schools. The network connects to a centralized data center for administration and monitoring, and delivers a host of new business applications—from student information, scholarship, and library management systems to finance, procurement, and business intelligence systems.
“Before the infrastructure transformation, we had very few systems that could support process efficiency,” says Younes. “We had many different legacy systems, which were complex and hard to manage. The new infrastructure has enabled a level of consolidation and centralization that we could have never contemplated before. Now, we have one system for all of the schools.”
The second phase focused on wide area network (WAN) optimization, which enhanced connectivity by up to 80 percent and made it easier to access the business applications. Phase three involves data center virtualization, leveraging the Intel® Xeon® processor-based Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS) for greater consolidation, environmental savings, and administrative flexibility.
“Private cloud is one of our key priorities now that we’ve transformed and virtualized our infrastructure,” he says. “In the past, if one teacher in one school wanted to teach students on a Linux server, it would have taken six months of provisioning. With the current platform, we can provision in five minutes and deprovision just as easily upon project completion. Giving business users the ability to self-provision has a whole host of advantages including time, cost, SLA, licensing, cooling, and energy savings. It’s early days for us, but I expect the business impact to be significant.”
A focus on outcomes
With the infrastructure project largely completed, Younes can focus on what comes next. In addition to a private cloud, he is eager to implement a learning management platform that supports virtual teaching, digital content, and online interactivity. In all of the projects, Younes is more focused on the educational results than the technology itself.
“This transformation isn’t about IT, although IT played an important role in enabling it,” says Younes. “It’s about improving the learning outcomes of students. Everything we did, from strategy and design to planning and implementation, had the student experience in mind. And I feel we have the foundation in place to truly transform education delivery.”
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In this complimentary workshop, the Cisco Domain Ten™ framework is used to assess the current state of your data center environment and create a custom roadmap for cloud acceleration and success. To qualify, visit: www.UnleashingIT.com
The Abu Dhabi Education Council implements sweeping infrastructure upgrades to create a new, world-class education model.
Transforming education delivery
Experiences
Unleashing IT14
Take your car for a routine oil change and you expect the mechanic to know its full history, make recommendations for preventive maintenance, and tell you when to rotate the tires. What if health checkups were similar? What if your physician followed an optimal healthcare plan designed specifically for you and was maintaining your health in order to avoid future problems?
Alegent Creighton Health, the largest not-for-profit, faith-based healthcare ministry in Nebraska and southwest Iowa, isn’t asking: “What if?” It’s already moving forward with preventive healthcare initiatives as part of its mission to “transform lives through meaningful relationships.”
“Historically, healthcare has been focused on treating patients after they’ve become sick,” says Duane Carbullido, Director of Enterprise Intelligence at Alegent Creighton Health, part of Catholic Health Initiatives. “What we haven’t done is take care of you when you’re not with us.”
Consisting of 11 hospitals and more than 100 clinic locations, Alegent Creighton Health is changing that approach by taking a more
holistic view of patient care, he says. One example is the Care Opportunity Report, an online report that leverages patient and clinical data stored in the organization’s data warehouse to devise individualized care plans for more than two million patients.
Optimizing technology for optimal care
When treating a single complaint such as a knee injury or sore throat, clinicians access the report to review all information pertaining to that patient, including existing conditions, prior treatments, and opportunities to provide additional care while the patient is in front of them. “It’s driving better health outcomes for our patients,” says Carbullido, explaining that the intelligent system applies proven best practices and guidelines to determine optimal care plans.
Supported by the underlying speed and flexibility of the Intel® Xeon® processor-based Cisco® Unified Computing System™ (UCS), the Care Opportunity Report is just one example of Alegent Creighton Health’s strong commitment to technology. Originally,
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the organization looked at implementing Cisco UCS™ as a platform to support Cisco Unified Communications Manager when moving to a brand new data center in 2010. As IT leaders became more familiar with the benefits of the technology, they decided to standardize on Cisco UCS for all systems moving forward, says Mark Howard, Alegent Creighton Health Operations Director, Networks and System Management.
“We had just built a state-of-the-art data center and if we kept going with rackmount servers, we were going to have to build out another suite much sooner than planned,” says Howard. “Cisco UCS gives us the flexibility to have not only speed, but also redundancy and uptime so that we don’t have to worry about systems going down. At the same time, we’re benefitting from connectivity, heating, cooling, and space savings, as well as the ease with which server profiles can move between blades.”
Enabling a healthcare ‘easy button’
Five years ago, prior to consolidating five separate data centers into one, the
organization had very little bandwidth between servers and was prone to downtime. Today, the new, 5,000 square foot data center operates on 10 GB connections supported by Cisco Nexus® 7000 Series Switches with dark fibre running to each location it serves. Its large Epic healthcare information system is 100 percent virtualized using VMware.
By standardizing on Cisco UCS and VMware, Alegent Creighton Health reduced the amount of cabling required in its data center, dramatically decreased the footprint per server, and instead of 38 connectivity ports per server is using just two ports per Cisco UCS blade. In the event of a server failure, the IT support team assigns the failed server profile to another server blade remotely, booting from the storage area network (SAN) and removing the need to drive to the data center.
The ease of provisioning new servers combined with the reliability of the data network is enabling forward-thinking healthcare plans that can be leveraged by the wider Catholic Health Initiatives system, says Howard. In addition to the Care
Opportunity Report, for example, Alegent Creighton Health’s Enterprise Intelligence group is looking at ways to prevent hospital readmissions, using a robust predictive indicator to determine a patient’s readmission risk and alert clinicians so they can address concerns before they become problematic.
“We want the technology environments we invest in to be reliable for clinicians and as accessible as the Staples® Easy Button for consumers,” says Howard. “It’s important to bring in systems that meet government regulations and create strong brand identity because in the future we aren’t necessarily going to be reimbursed for treating patients when they’re sick. We’re going to be reimbursed for demonstrating that we are keeping them healthy in the first place.”
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34%
Industry-Leading Database Performance
34% Faster 2
For more performance information, visit cisco.com/go/ucsbenchmarks. 1. Based on SPECjbb2005 benchmark on Cisco UCS C220 M3 server at 1,584,567 BOPS, 792,284 BOPS/JVM. 2. Based on TPC Benchmark C Results on 2 Processor Systems. Cisco UCS C240 M3 High-Density Rack Server with Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Standard Edition One, 1,609,186.39 tpmC, $0.47/tpmC, available 9/27/12 compared to IBM Power 780 Server Model 9179-MHB with IBM DB2 9.5, 1,200,011.00 tpmC, $0.69/tpmC, available 10/13/10. 3. Based on SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark with 8 total Java EE Server processors on Cisco UCS B440 M2 servers at 26,118.67 EjOPS compared to RISC-based IBM Power 780 at 16,646.34 EjOPS. SPEC®, SPECjbb®, and SPECjEnterprise® are registered trademarks of Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation. TPC Benchmark C® is a trademark of the Transaction Performance Processing Council (TPC). The performance results described here are derived from detailed benchmark results available at http://www.spec.org and http://www.tpc.org as of 1-15-2013. ©2013 Cisco and/or its a� liates. All rights reserved. All third-party products belong to the companies that own them. Cisco, the Cisco logo, and Cisco UCS are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Unparalleled Application Performance with Cisco Servers.
1,584,567
Find out more at cisco.com/servers
Cisco Uni� ed Computing System
Outperforms RISC by
On Java Applications3
Business Operations Per Second:Unparalleled Cisco Server Performance. 1
57%With Intel® Xeon® processors
Cisco-UCS_App-Q3-7.75x10.5.indd 1 1/28/13 3:52 PM
