Case Study
MemorialCare boosts savings and compliance with greater visibility
At a glance
Industry: Health care
Location: Southern California (Orange and L.A. counties)
Employees: 15,000+
Products: Snow SaaS Management, Snow Spend Optimizer - SAM
Featured results
- Cost avoidance of over $3 million since implementation 10 years ago
- Reduced software audit response times from 8 weeks to less than 1 hour
- Potential 10% cut in Oracle software license costs
The challenge
Struggling with software license compliance and change management
MemorialCare Health Systems, a highly successful hospital system in Southern California, encompasses five hospitals, corporate offices, multiple affiliate outpatient facilities and ancillary facilities. Their Software and Hardware Asset Management program supports over 15,000 employees and thousands of related endpoints and servers.
Sr. Software Compliance Manager Terolyn Phinsee governs the program. She knows firsthand that keeping it strong has been the key to securing their IT infrastructure and ensuring software license compliance—and she can recall when it wasn’t as robust: “Over fourteen years ago, we realized that one of our challenges was software agreement compliance. We also had challenges with software version control, change management, and with identifying which software titles required a license and which did not.”
The solution
Rationalized and optimized software, thanks to unprecedented visibility
The MemorialCare team chose Snow SaaS Management and Snow Spend Optimizer to help solve their software discovery and change management issues. They used Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager to deploy the Snow discovery agent and compared the results to their Active Directory organizational units. Once they identified most of their endpoints and servers, they compiled a list of software installations and rationalized the software titles by comparing them to their internal software catalog. They then contacted each of the software publishers to obtain their entitlement information and purchased additional licenses where needed.
The discovery agent also provided details on the total number of software titles installed, devices installed, date installed, when a user last used the software and who used it last. This visibility gave them unprecedented knowledge that they used to identify and uninstall unused licenses. The team also contracted with SoftwareOne to assist them with procurement, software license reviews and more.
Had we not implemented Flexera, we would not have been prepared for software license reviews. This would have resulted in an unbudgeted expense of well over $3 million since implementation 10 years ago. Not only in license true-up cost, penalties and tariffs, but also in the cost to have staff identify software installations manually.
Terolyn Phinsee, Sr. Software Compliance Manager MemorialCare Health Systems
The result
Greater compliance and risk/cost avoidance lead to satisfaction, savings and efficiency
When asked about the results MemorialCare experienced with their implementation of Flexera products, Phinsee responded with the following list of three major improvement areas:
“Number one, risk avoidance. A major publisher requested a license review. We used our Flexera system to quantify software installations and verified that they aligned with our entitlement.
Number two, cost avoidance. We did not renew certain software agreements because Flexera identified that software with zero usage in our environment. We removed the software and no longer pay for it.
Number three, HIPAA compliance. Our hardware asset managers (i.e., the Desktop Services Team) use Flexera to identify quarantined devices. A formal investigation is made to confirm that such devices are not lost or stolen, protecting our network and our data and ensuring HIPAA compliance.”
Discovering non-usage of licensed software gave MemorialCare the opportunity to re-harvest and reassign licenses and avoid unnecessary costs. Memorial Care also used application installation and usage data found with the discovery agent and compared that with entitlements to effectively prepare for true-up and renewal events. “We used Flexera to identify software that should not be in our environment,” Phinsee says. “We remove it immediately upon being notified of such software—resulting in our ability to further secure our environment.”
Phinsee and her team also had Flexera’s help with internal software license review (SLR) soft audits on a regular basis. As a result of these SLR audits, MemorialCare was able to be proactive, by removing unused software and purchasing needed licenses to avoid penalties, fines, and back usage fees they would have faced if the publisher requested the license review.
Prior to Flexera, we responded to a software license review and took 8 weeks to identify software installs. The same license review using Snow discovery [agent] takes less than an hour!
Terolyn Phinsee, Sr. Software Compliance Manager MemorialCare Health Systems
“I recommend that customers using Flexera consider these best practices to save money for your organization, Phinsee asserts. “For us, these savings are identified early because of the discovery tools. Such savings can result in re-allocation of funds to hire additional staff, cut operational costs, purchase equipment, provide training for staff and so much more.”
Perhaps the largest, most significant outcome of the Flexera product implementation for Phinsee’s team is becoming fiscally responsible and saving their organization an extensive amount of money and time. “Over 400 software titles are managed through Flexera for change management and software license compliance,” Phinsee says. “Over 14,500 devices and servers are managed through Flexera, [and] our Service Desk receives over 400 calls per day from over 15,000 employees. The Service Desk staff uses the ServiceNow and Flexera interface to verify hardware specifics when troubleshooting and supporting the devices. Our SAM and HAM programs are very efficient and effective because of the Snow asset management system.”
According to Phinsee, “The ROI . . . is significant. Had we not implemented Flexera, we would not have been prepared for software license reviews. This would have resulted in an unbudgeted expense of well over $3 million since implementation 10 years ago. Not only in license true-up cost, penalties, and tariffs, but also in the cost to have staff identify software installations manually.”