Sankara Nethralaya, a speciality institution for ophthalmic care based in Chennai has outsourced its IT architecture to IBM for five years.

The hospital has implemented Network Operations Center–Inside (NOC-Inside), an IBM solution which offers integrated IT management solution that revolutionizes the enterprise’s business operations. NOC–Inside, with its asset-based integrated service approach, allows the hospital a 360-degree view of its IT infrastructure, and thereby helping effective monitoring.

With NOC-Inside service offering, the hospital has automated IT monitoring, IT inventory management and IT service desk operations. NOC-Inside generates daily reports allowing it to keep track of the entire hardware and software inventory and ensure software license compliance. These reports also help the hospital verify the service level commitments of their service providers and accordingly gauge their performance. Dashboards facilitate real-time measurement of IT service performance and generate alerts when corrective actions are required. This helps the facility management team to resolve any errors on the network even before it escalates to be a predicament.

“We measure our return on investments in terms of the hospital’s productivity. The implementation of NOC-Inside has resulted in substantial savings in operational costs besides bolstering productivity. We have seen the reduction of manual intervention by almost 60%. IBM’s solution is an assurance against downtime and makes certain our ROI is positive. We are now exploring possibilities of furthering our relationship with IBM,” said T Rathinam, Director-IT, Sankara Nethralaya.
 
“With the help of NOC-Inside, we can now effortlessly measure the SLAs of our service providers and resolve network-related problems in a small fraction of time,” said M K Manavalan, IT- Head, Sankara Nethralaya. “With the benefits that we have accrued by real-time performance measurements of our IT infrastructure, we wonder how we would have managed our investments on IT without NOC-Inside.”

Launched earlier this year, NOC-Inside is currently the only available 'Integrated and Automated IT Management Service' in the marketplace. It has been developed by Network Solutions (NetSol), the network integration company acquired by IBM two years ago. Today NetSol integrates closely with the Global Technology Services business of IBM and provides industry-leading solutions in the areas of network management and remote infrastructure management.

“IBM Global Technology Services leverages the unique capabilities and strong customer base of NetSol while solving the IT infrastructure challenges of customers both in large enterprises as well as SMBs. The adoption of NOC-Inside by Sankara Nethralya is yet another testimony to how a well-integrated acquisition by IBM has resulted in benefits for the end-customers,” said Nipun Mehrotra, Director, Global Technology Services, IBM India/SA.

IBM’s NOC-Inside solution will also result in several other benefits for the hospital. These include:

• Immediate identification and resolution of IT Availability or Performance issues will help save time
  
• Reduction of manual intervention by almost 60% percent
  
• Tracking of the response and resolution productivity of the helpdesk and service engineers

“An increasing number of hospitals today rely on technology for their business undertakings. As one of the leading eye hospitals in India, effective management and efficient monitoring of the IT infrastructure will enable Sankara Nethralaya reduce administrative burden, simplify network, server and application management, derive control over assets (hardware and software), and streamline helpdesk management processes.  This would ultimately ensure utmost patient care,” said Praveen Cherian, CEO, Network Solutions (An IBM Company).

NOC-Inside enables businesses to take complete control through "end-to-end visibility" of their IT infrastructure with minimal integration effort, low level of operational expertise and very attractive operational cost. Also being a subscription-based service, NOC-Inside allows huge scalability for the customers who pay as they use. A unique feature of this offering is the 'IT Advisory Service' that maximizes returns by providing access to IBM-NetSol IT management expertise - providing analysis of IT infrastructure issues, proactive problem identification, growth planning and performance improvement.

Leveraging IBM NetSol's domain expertise, this innovative, scalable and easy-to-implement offering, is designed to address the IT monitoring and management needs of clients across every segment in the marketplace.

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