North Broward Hospital District (NBHD) is a four-hospital, 1,567-bed healthcare system that also operates 30 freestanding clinics and provides home health services to the Fort Lauderdale, Florida area. NBHD network infrastructure includes approximately 3,000 desktop PCs running Windows 95 and between 500 and 600 Windows NT workstations. On the server side, NBHD is running 60 NetWare and 30 Windows NT Server boxes.

As for software, North Broward Hospital District administrators oversee approximately 400 applications. They push an average of 15 new or updated applications out to various departments every month using ZENworks for Desktops. According to Robert Garito, systems analyst for the Hospital District, this level of software distribution would be impossible without ZENworks.

However, NBHD administrators wanted to extend the value of their ZENworks investment by reducing the amount of time to process ZENworks snAppShots for their target environments. Garito estimates that between 30 minutes to an hour per application was required to manually edit settings such as user name and drive mappings before they could be made into usable application objects. That's time NBHD administrators had to devote every month to a tedious task-time that could better be spent doing something else. ZENworks for Desktops enables rapid distribution of snAppShots out of the box, but busy NBHD administrators needed an even faster way to create application objects.

With the deployment of Centralis AXE, the amount of time dedicated to application object preparation dropped significantly. Centralis AXE allows North Broward administrators to quickly create, edit and store rules to automate manual changes, including those to separate an application snAppShot into workstation and user portions. This allows administrators to install 95 percent of the application once to be shared by as many users as the network can serve.

On average, it now takes just 5-10 minutes to process a snAppShot using Centralis AXE. By adding up all the hours no longer dedicated to dealing with application object issues, month after month, it is easy to conclude that Centralis AXE saves NBHD substantial sums of money and offers a quick return on investment.

"The problem we had before deploying Centralis AXE was that there wasn't much consistency-a lot of application objects had a lot of junk in them that could cause problems," said NBHD's Robert Garito. "I was tasked with going through every one of them and cleaning them up, which took almost a year to do. But the last 50 percent of the work was completed after BrainShareSM 2000 in Salt Lake City, when we bought Centralis AXE. And it took about a month to complete the project, where it would have taken another 6 to 8 months if we hadn't had Centralis AXE."

Now, with every application object that any NBHD administrator creates, Robert Garito and his colleagues run it through Centralis AXE as part of the procedure. The majority of the work is done by Centralis AXE.

Novell's annual BrainShare conference allows Novell employees, customers and partners to discover the latest Novell-based networking solutions and their respective vendors. With over 1,500 customers worldwide, Centralis successfully debuted its AXE product in North America at BrainShare 2000 in Salt Lake City, introducing this growing UK company and its products to new enterprise customers, including North Broward Hospital District.

Centralis creates software that simplifies complex processes and helps network administrators and systems integrators overcome problems inherent in many of today's multiplatform enterprise environments. With its full support of ZENworks and administrators who depend on the combined Novell-Centralis solution everyday, Centralis AXE is a sterling example of a simple, yet highly practical network solution. It certainly works for North Broward Hospital District, automating a vital network management task, thus reducing administrative headaches and staffing costs.

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