City of Daytona Beach: Networking for tourists
When this Florida hot spot began designing a converged voice, data and video network, it had two phenomena to consider: swarms of tourists ¨® nearly 8 million a year ¨® and hurricanes. The network needed to be fully redundant and fault-tolerant, and provide end-to-end quality of service (QoS), because of the public safety applications riding over it. In a $3.3 million project, the city built a converged Gigabit Ethernet backbone using Nortel¨ªs Passport 8600 routing switches, which run QoS filters and accept voice-over-IP traffic from PBXs. QoS is further ensured through filters and dedicated 10/100M bit/sec links to desktops. The city is reaping productivity gains and networking cost reductions ¨® tallying the first year return on investment at more than $260,000. New applications in the works include letting public safety officials view, from any networked computer, street video cameras to help monitor crowds during events such as the Daytona 500. Advertisement:

Concentra Health Services: Wireless care giving
One of the central tenets of this occupational healthcare provider¨ªs mission is to equip employees and facilities with tools that ensure the highest quality of medical care. Lately, that has meant deploying tablet-sized Windows CE devices loaded with a point-of-care application in a $5 million wireless connectivity project. From a tablet PC, an examiner can enter patient notes and instantly download the file to the facility¨ªs main network over 802.11b wireless LAN links, saving the company $3 million annually in transcription fees alone, says Jay Wilson, vice president of IT at Concentra in Addison, Texas. Going wireless also enabled Concentra to save $2,000 on the cost of traditional network equipment it would have needed at each of the company¨ªs 240 clinics, or close to half a million dollars.

Dreyer Medical Clinic: Speeding the medical process
This multispecialty medical group in Aurora, Ill., coupled a central patient database with network accelerators to automate and streamline data entry. Dreyer rolled out a suite of enterprise software applications from Epic Systems to integrate all data relevant to patient care ¨® from intake and patient records to physician scheduling, lab test requisitions, and billing ¨® in a central repository, eliminating redundant data entry. To handle the network strain caused by users logging on to the central repository without introducing significant cost, the medical center deployed Expand Networks¨ª Accelerator network appliances. Dreyer now can optimize bandwidth, monitor and prioritize network traffic, and speed applications through these appliances. The company has realized a five-times improvement in network throughput over the links on which Accelerators are installed, which translates into a 2- to 3-second faster response time per minute. Dreyer¨ªs prudence is paying off: The company spent only $14,000 on the network accelerators but expects to get a 50% return on its investment in the first year.

GevityHR: Extending the enterprise
GevityHR, an outsourced human resources services provider in Bradenton, Fla., uses portal and CRM software to differentiate itself from competitors. From the portal, called GevityHR Central, clients and their employees can process payroll; access an HR knowledge base that houses information on federal and state regulations, among other business information; calculate compensation; and download business templates. For the project, the company uses Oracle¨ªs E-Business suite and portal application server software, which run on a fully redundant Hewlett-Packard server infrastructure. New CRM software, also from Oracle, provides employees at 40 branch offices online access to client account information. Migrating to an Internet-based e-business model and adopting CRM has let the company improve service to clients, reduce operating expenses and handle more transactions. In 2001, GevityHR processed more than 700,000 Web transactions and routed more than 14 million e-mail messages. Since deploying the CRM software, GevityHR says it has seen work time on certain transactions drop by 27%.

Health First: Creating loyalty through teleworking
This nonprofit, locally managed and governed healthcare provider serving Brevard County, Fla., turned to teleworking to retain and attract critical contract employees ¨® the transcriptionists it uses to transcribe physician-dictated patient histories, operation reports and clinical documentation. In the process, Health First realized it could leverage the teleworking infrastructure for any clinical and administrative professional needing to work from home by providing the same desktop environment, including the phone, PC and applications. Health First extended the phone system via Siemens¨ª HiPath Teleworking product, giving at-home workers the same features and functions as corporate office staff. The teleworkers link to corporate resources via Time Warner Cable¨ªs Road Runner service, which supports downloads at 1.5M bit/sec and uploads at 384K bit/sec, over a VPN created using Novell Border Manager. Additionally, Health First manages teleworker accounts and application rights using Novell Directory Services, the existing corporate directory service, and automates downloading of application updates via Novell ZENWorks. Health First, in Viera, Fla., implemented this teleworking infrastructure for $80,000, without incurring costs for training because of the desktop extension.

Household International: Calling all customers locally
Household International, a leading provider of consumer loan and credit products in Prospect Heights, Ill., had a big problem. Marketing efforts were generating five million leads per month, but only 40% of those leads were worked actively. The company needed a way to track calling behavior at the branches so it could improve those processes and, as a result, increase sales. John Armstrong, managing director of networked systems, figured Household needed to locate call center and customer service applications at the branch offices, but manage them centrally. He identified the need for an integrated communications platform (ICP) that would provide sophisticated voice services for 24-7 call processing and data networking. In a $12 million project, Household deployed Vertical Networks¨ª InstantOffice ICP to its 1,400 branches after an exhaustive pilot program. Now every branch can handle inbound and outbound calling locally, and corporate can capture data for evaluation. The company expects to realize a 15% to 20% gain in sales for 2002, and Armstrong cites a $4.2 million cost-savings in network charges alone. It deployed T-1 lines along with InstantOffice, saving an average of $3,000 annually per branch office.

Northern Trust: Banking on storage-area management
Chicago financial services company Northern Trust always has been an early adopter of storage-area network (SAN) technology, says Karl Huf, a vice president with the company. Its latest SAN efforts involves storage-area management (SAM), essential to achieve the full power of the company¨ªs diverse SAN environment, according to Huf. The company has two redundant SANs, comprising 12 Inrange Technologies¨ª FC/9000 Fibre Channel switches, four QLogic SANbox switches, and seven 9900 and 9900 V series storage systems from Hitachi Data Systems to back up Windows NT and Unix servers. Northern Trust researched a number of SAM products and then conducted an extensive in-house evaluation of its top choice, Pathline from InterSAN. Pathline centralizes and automates the discovery, monitoring, provisioning and control of heterogenous distributed SANs from an applications viewpoint.

By implementing SAM, Huf says he expects to be able to manage Northern Trust¨ªs growing SAN environment five years from now with the same headcount. Storage volume from first-quarter 2002 to first-quarter 2003 will grow from 40 terabytes to more than 100 terabytes, he says. Volume could grow by as much as 200 terabytes per year or more, and Huf says he expects to be able to maintain storage with the same manager and five staff members handling it now. Other benefits of SAM are central control and monitoring of large, complex, distributed SANs and automation of many manual and error-prone tasks, he says.

Ohio State University Medical Center: Doctoring with PDAs
Adopting mobile technology has made residents and students at OSU Medical Center, in Columbus, more productive and efficient ¨® and it has earned the hospital accolades from the healthcare industry. For outfitting 1,600 medical professionals with Palm PDAs and building the mobile infrastructure to support them, the medical center has earned the American Hospital Association¨ªs Innovator Award for innovative use of technology and the 2001 Elizabeth Davies Award for accomplishments in providing electronic medical records. OSU Medical Center¨ªs extensive PDA program includes six components: distribution; training/user education; content/delivery development and coordination; enterprise synching solutions (through XcelleNet technology); PDA expansion and add-ons; and imaging/ongoing troubleshooting, says Robert McKenney, program director. The medical center has dispersed infrared ports throughout nurses¨ª stations and student lounges that doctors and students use to sync the data on their devices with current information. Hardware, software and services costs for the first 1,000 PDAs deployed ran to $400,000.

Sundt Construction: Building business continuity
When this $500 million construction company in Tempe, Ariz., realized it had a critical fault in a mission-critical application, it acted immediately to shore up its disaster-recovery and business-continuity plans. The application, which is called Prolog and is hosted at one of Sundt¨ªs major data centers in Southern California, tracks project documents, schedules and resources, and lets project teams collaborate with subcontractors and customers through a Web interface. Sundt ran into major problems when it upgraded Prolog to a SQL version so team members could get global access to customer information 24-7. Using SQL replication on the databases corrupted files and prevented Sundt from accurately backing up the data on the Southern California server. Also of concern was the availability of the data center itself, given its location on an active earthquake fault line, the events of Sept. 11 and the 2001 energy crisis in California. Sundt addressed these problems by revamping its server architecture, while making the most of existing resources and installing data replication software from NSI Software.

In the new server architecture, back-up servers in each location do double duty as disaster-recovery servers. The server in Southern California replicates to a server in Arizona and vice versa. If the target server reports an error, failover can occur in 25 seconds via NSI¨ªs Double-Take software. This setup ensures that Sundt will not lose access to its mission-critical Prolog application for more than minutes at a time. The back-up and disaster-recovery scheme cost only $30,000, far less than the $145,000 per day Sundt would lose if without access to the Southern California data center and Prolog, according to a company spokesman.

Toronto Blue Jays: Ticket masters
With the goal of making the fan experience as fun and efficient as possible, this major league baseball outfit has turned to ¨¬cyber selling.? Donning wearable computers, Blue Jays ticket agents can roam parking lots, transportation depots, shopping malls and other areas adjacent to Toronto¨ªs SkyDome looking for fans who want to buy tickets, or they can come out from behind their ticket windows to reduce long lines there. The wearable computers, Mobile Assistant V from Xybernaut, feature a flat-panel display with touch screen, mobile credit card processing equipment, a portable printer and direct integration with the team¨ªs databases for instant access to ticketing and other information. The devices support General Packet Radio Service, for always-on connectivity. The wearable computer project has resulted in reduced ticket scalping, speedier ticket purchases and fewer empty seats in the ballpark, a company spokesman says.

Town of Burlington, Mass.: A VoIP city
This town, 13 miles from Boston, lives by the motto ¨¬where technology comes to work.? For town workers, that means using a voice-over-IP (VoIP) network installed for half the monthly fee but with the same features and twice the number of lines of Centrex service, says Jim Round, IS director for Burlington. Using Siemens VoIP gear and existing fiber, Burlington has linked 16 buildings ¨® Town Hall; fire, police and office facilities; and six schools. Particularly beneficial is that each phone is reachable via a four-digit extension and is identifiable for an internal E-911 application. ¨¬With Centrex, only the building where the caller worked could be identified,? Round says. ¨¬But now, valuable time can be saved ¨® and hopefully lives ¨® by immediately knowing the exact office from which an emergency call is placed.? The VoIP deployment cost $900,000.

University of Pennsylvania: Cancer grid
The University of Pennsylvania is leading multiple hospitals in an innovative computer grid, used for researching breast cancer. The grid, a massive distributed computer that delivers computing resources as a utility over the Internet, is being used to store mammograms in digital forms. The grid will provide analytical tools that will help physicians diagnose individual cases and identify cancer clusters in the population. It will give authorized medical personnel near-instantaneous access to patient records and reduce the need for expensive film X-rays. The grid uses a three-tier architecture of IBM eServer servers and open protocols from Globus; the grid runs AIX, Linux and Windows. Participating hospitals connect to the grid via secure Internet portals. This grid project has cost approximately $6 million, but it is expected that participating hospitals will realize millions in yearly cost-savings by not having to develop X-ray films.

University of South Dakota: A real mobile campus
While many colleges and universities are touting the concept of a mobile campus, USD in Vermillion is actively building one. In fall 2001, the university mandated that incoming freshman and some faculty rely on PDAs for basic classroom tasks such as taking notes, obtaining or distributing class materials, and turning in assignments. Tapping into infrared ports around campus, the students can access e-mail and other applications via Palm devices, says Roberta Ambur, CIO, at the university. Data is synchronized among student platforms via XTNDConnect Server software from Extend Systems. To date, the university is supporting about 2,500 PDAs, 90% of those being student devices and the rest faculty PDAs. Additionally, five courses are PDA-only, and every 101-level course is PDA-based. As a testament to USD¨ªs innovation, Ambur says she receives nearly daily calls from other university technologists regarding the PDA deployment.

W.R. Grace & Co.: Specialty collaboration
Already a big user of videoconferencing, this global specialty chemicals and materials company, naturally turned to collaboration technology when it wanted to reduce travel costs, improve efficiencies and increase employee productivity. Web conferencing is its latest endeavor, via Polycom¨ªs WebOffice software installed in 18 networked conference rooms worldwide. Far-flung Grace employees can meet face to face via video and share data using Web conferencing tools. The company says it already has seen a significant reduction in decision-making time as a result. Also important, WebOffice can be installed behind a firewall but still let Grace conduct Web conferences with customers and partners not on the corporate network. Grace, in Columbia, Md., is spending about $35,500 in software licensing and high-speed Internet access charges for Web conferencing. In the first year, it expects to save between $400,000 and $500,000 in travel costs, among other expenses.