Customer Story: GE Healthcare

Read about how GE Healthcare's Nuclear Medicine R&D center significantly improved its license management by implementing SoftWatch’s OptimizeIT.

Customer Profile

GE Healthcare provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Headquartered in the United Kingdom, GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric Company. Worldwide, GE Healthcare employs more than 46,000 people committed to serving healthcare professionals and their patients in more than 100 countries.

GE nuclear medicine products, featuring the Infinia family of imaging systems, Xeleris workstation and now the Ventri nuclear cardiology camera system, are leading the way to help solve the most challenging dilemmas facing nuclear medicine. GE Healthcare's Nuclear Medicine R&D center is located in Haifa, Israel. The center employs some 300 engineers.

Situation

Until 2005, GE Healthcare's Nuclear Medicine R&D center didn't have a coherent license management policy. The distribution server was open to everyone, some license details couldn't be found, and many users didn't even know they had licenses for specific applications.
In 2005, the IT department initiated an intensive 3 months project in order to get a clearer picture of the software needs. The IT department checked which applications are installed and who uses them, and held numerous interviews with users and managers. This project enabled the R&D center to reduce software costs: for instance, the IT department discovered that out of 100 MS Project licenses, only 10 were used on a daily basis!
However, even after this fruitful project, the IT department was able to neither effectively keep track of the software usage nor to empirically deduce which users really need specific applications. Also, most of the applications didn't release the licenses back to the license server, and sometimes users couldn't find a free license to use.

Solution

In 2008, the IT department started looking for an automated solution in order to further improve the license utilization and prevent unnecessary expenses. After a comprehensive review of the license management market, the department chose SoftWatch's OpitmizeIT-Enterprise.
SoftWatch's professional team completed the implementation and the customer training in several days. Within hours, the IT department was able to close the same gap that required 3 months of work only 3 years ago. This time, the results were better and faster, with neither physical audits nor user interviews at all.
Now, OptimizeIT enables the IT department to transfer software licenses from one user to another based on real-time license usage. By drastically improving the IT monitoring abilities, it also helps to make sure that the R&D center is fully compliant with relevant regulation and procedures.

Financial Benefits

By using OptimizeIT-Enterprise, GE Healthcare's Nuclear Medicine R&D center reduced the amount of software licenses at 20 percent. Furthermore, for more than a year, the R&D center hasn't bought a single software license!

The quick implementation of OptimizeIT-Enterprise immediately saved tens of thousands of dollars for the organization. Even with OptimizeIT-Enterprise price taken into consideration, the R&D center expects to save additional $20,000 every year thanks to better license management and productivity gain.

Conclusion

Nadav Drori, IT Leader at GE Healthcare, says that OptimizeIT constantly provides him with a clear image of the inventory and the exact amount of licenses that are needed. According to him, OptimizeIT present accurate and valuable information that leads to a clear return of investment (ROI).

This solution was so successful that the customer considers to expand it to EDA applications with another SoftWatch product, OptimizeIT-PRO. In addition, other GE Healthcare worldwide sites are also considering to implement it.