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Healthcare technology solutions provider McKesson is at the forefront of the digital healthcare renaissance. The company helps hospitals modernize patient care with an array of technology solutions, from electronic health record (EHR) systems, to decision support software and point-of-care bar code medication scanning applications.
But in order for McKesson to help hospitals modernize patient care, it must continuously innovate its products and solutions. To do this, the company turned to cloud technology.
McKesson uses cloud platform for scalable, flexible application development
To maintain a healthy pipeline of product innovations, McKesson IT has a robust application development organization.
"Depending on where we are in the project lifecycle, our development center serves between 2,500 and 3,000 developers and QA staff, both on-and-offshore," says Merritte Stidston, director, Development Center Strategy & Operations, McKesson Corp. "We're constantly testing and creating builds of our latest software releases."
With such a large application development organization it's critical that McKesson IT provision development environments—servers, storage, networking and computing power—quickly and easily. Otherwise, it can't innovate effectively for the business or get the level of productivity it needs from developers.
"While our server, storage and networking infrastructure was current, it wasn't forward leaning and didn't provide us the flexibility and scalability we needed," Stidston explains. McKesson IT needed flexibility and scalability to innovate for the business.
Cloud technology key to McKesson's innovation
To provision application development environments faster, McKesson IT is leveraging cloud technology with HP CloudSystem Matrix, a private cloud platform that lets you provision infrastructure and applications in as little as two hours.
"To meet the changing and growing needs of the development and QA teams, we needed to find a way to do a lot more while containing cost," says Stidston. "We could not do this without Matrix."
Using HP CloudSystem Matrix, McKesson has achieved dramatic improvements, in both performance gains and cost savings:
- Dramatically faster provisioning of development environments (40 minutes vs. 7 days)
- 42 percent reduction in physical server count (700 down from 1,200)
- 67 percent less management time required (two engineers vs. six)
McKesson achieves business benefits with cloud technology
McKesson's use of cloud technology has increased its agility, enabling the company to maintain a steady flow of product innovations.
"We can now provision a typical development environment in 15 to 30 minutes, using templates for servers, storage and networking," says Stidston.
McKesson's improved IT agility helps the company innovate its products continuously, solidifying its leadership within the healthcare industry. The company projects cost savings from its CloudSystem Matrix solution to be in the millions.
For more detail on how McKesson is using cloud technology, read the full case study (PDF 3.5MB).
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