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A CLEVER eRoute Case Study
AES - the Business Service Management Company
A Major Health Care Organization based in St. Louis
This company is one of the largest nonprofit health-care organizations in the United States, primarily delivering services to residents in the greater St. Louis, southern Illinois and mid-Missouri regions. With net revenues of $2.1 billion, the company serves rural, urban, and suburban communities, and includes 13 hospitals, five skilled-nursing facilities, a retirement community, and other community health locations. Services include inpatient and outpatient care, primary care, community health and wellness, workplace health, home health, community mental health, dental practices, long-term care, and hospice care.
The Background
The company's centrally managed data network interconnects over 70 locations in this mid-western region by utilizing a mix of frame-relay, ATM, and metro-Ethernet facilities that includes in excess of 100 Cisco® routers and routing switches within the network. Just a few years ago, most of the information transmitted through the network was primarily financial and administrative in nature. The last few years, however, have seen an increasing amount of clinical patient data routed through the network for quick analysis by medical staff in other locations, including images and streaming video. The performance of the network has thus become increasingly important in providing timely delivery of patient care information. Knowledge of delays and alternate route information can also help their Data Communications department effectively plan for future administrative services, such as IP telephony and videoconferencing. With this in mind, the department decided it must invest in specific tools to facilitate network performance monitoring and route analysis.
The Problem
Rather than select a single suite of products that may have included unneeded functions, the company's data communications department was given a mandate to mix and match products from individual vendors that had functionality specific to their stated requirements. For instance, the department believed there was a critical need for a product powerful enough to review and manage IP routing, perform daily route studies and fault isolation for the entire network, establish baselines for hops and delays to each site, and provide data for long-term performance trending. They chose to look at CLEVER eRoute for these specific reasons, in addition to meeting their budgeting constraints.
The Solution
Following thorough analysis, the company's personnel determined that CLEVER eRoute did indeed prove to be an invaluable tool for managing and documenting its network, benchmarking performance, and analyzing route usage. Recent product enhancements complete the department last two objectives: providing remote, multi-platform (MVS, Linux and Wintel) data collection and serving as a managing interface with an automated scheduler for the data collection routines. Now the product can be instantly deployed to assist in analyzing and resolving routing problems whenever - and wherever - they may occur in the network.
AES focuses on the development of network performance and availability Business Service Management solutions. Through its strong emphasis on listening to customers, foreseeing far-reaching trends in the marketplace, and providing stellar support systems, AES continues to maintain its lead in providing state-of-the-art, easy-to-use performance tools for the very backbone of eCommerce.
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