ExtraHop Saves McKesson More Than $600,000 Dollars Annually in IT Operations Costs

ORLANDO, FL--(Marketwired - February 24, 2014) - HIMSS -- ExtraHop, the global leader in real-time wire data analytics for IT operational intelligence, today announced that McKesson Managed Services is using the ExtraHop wire data analytics platform to dramatically improve visibility into the performance of its hosted applications, including clinical, financial, and electronic health record (EHR) applications for hospitals across the United States.

As hospitals and healthcare organizations face the growing challenge of managing a diverse array of complex applications, a sizeable number are turning to McKesson to outsource their mission-critical application hosting, allowing them to focus on increasing efficiency as well as quality of care. As McKesson's application hosting business continues to rapidly expand to meet this demand, the company sought a better way to troubleshoot problems, optimize performance, and ensure data security, even as complexity continues to increase.

"We could not afford to gather experts in every discipline to diagnose and fix problems," said Scott Checkoway, Director of Application Hosting at McKesson. "To meet our commitments to customers and scale our operations, it was clear that we needed a way to triage and troubleshoot issues more efficiently."

The ability to identify and troubleshoot Citrix XenApp performance issues proved particularly vexing. A team of Citrix consultants was brought in for a four-month engagement, although limited visibility across McKesson's environment prevented them from getting to the root of the problem. As a result, McKesson turned to ExtraHop.

Doug McMartin, Director of Application Hosting Development at McKesson, explained, "With ExtraHop, our team was able to rapidly identify a series of failed DNS record lookups that were adding significant latency to Citrix launch and load times, with each failed DNS record lookup taking roughly five seconds to resolve. By identifying and removing bad DNS records, we saw average application launch times drop from 40 seconds to 12 seconds -- nearly 75 percent faster."

"When we first began working with McKesson, lack of visibility into their incredibly complex environment left them unable to identify and troubleshoot problems efficiently," said Jesse Rothstein, CEO, ExtraHop. "With ExtraHop, McKesson has made the leap to consistent performance, availability, and security for their hosting customers. Our solution is helping them to avoid SLA penalties, even as their application hosting business expands."

Since first deploying ExtraHop in March 2012, the McKesson team has used the solution to gain critical visibility across their IT environment. By analyzing wire data, the Application Hosting team is able to identify the source of problems before contacting domain-specific experts, resulting in a 90 percent reduction in troubleshooting time.

"ExtraHop enables us to solve incredibly complex problems in a matter of hours, with an IT operations staff built around generalists rather than relying on specialists. Extrapolated across our business, we're saving at least $400,000 annually in terms of time spent troubleshooting, and we saved over $260,000 in staffing in our first year," said Checkoway.

In addition to streamlining troubleshooting, the McKesson team is leveraging wire data from ExtraHop to optimize the performance, availability, and security of their hosting environment. The team can now easily track and report on KPIs and SLAs for each customer, monitor all communications on the wire to proactively prevent potential data leakage and malware, and identify previously hidden inefficiencies such as slow SQL queries.

For more information about how McKesson is benefiting from the ExtraHop solution, visit us in booth #3291 at the HIMSS 2014 Conference and read the case study: McKesson Makes Application Hosting for Hospitals Faster, More Efficient.

Learn more about how ExtraHop is able to identify and remediate Citrix ICA client latency, then request the free-forever ExtraHop appliance to see it for yourself.

About ExtraHop
ExtraHop is the global leader in real-time wire data analytics. The ExtraHop Operational Intelligence Platform analyzes all L2-L7 communications, including full bidirectional transactional payloads. This innovative approach provides the correlated, cross-tier visibility essential for application performance, availability, and security in today's complex and dynamic IT environments. The winner of numerous awards from Network Computing, Interop, TechTarget, and others, the ExtraHop platform scales up to 20 Gbps in a single appliance, deploys without agents, and delivers tangible value in less than 15 minutes. Learn what we mean at www.extrahop.com or follow us on Twitter @ExtraHop.