THE CME GLOBAL STRUCTURE

Figure 1 shows the top-level wide-area networking schematic of CME. CME Corporate maintains a data center at its five-building campus (Figure 2) supporting 1,500 local users and another 1,500 remote users at remote offices.

Figure cs-1: Clinical Medical Equipment (CME) network schematic

Figure cs-2: The CME corporate campus topology

CME-CORP

The CME global structure

• – Provides services to two regional offices (CME-WEST and CME-EUR) and the Manufacturing Plant (CME-MEX)

• – Provides services to all mobile users and the beta test site

• – Provides services to 50 directly connected Sales Offices with 1520 employees each under the administrative control of their respective region:

  • – WEST region: 10 offices

  • – EUR region: 10 offices

  • – CORP region: 30 offices

• – Includes CME-WEST located in Seattle with 200 users, responsible for the Asia-Pacific region:

  • – CME-WEST will be the disaster recovery site for CME-CORP

• – Includes CME-EUR located in Frankfurt with 200 users, responsible for the EU, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA)

• – Includes CME-MEX located in Mexico City with 300 users

• – Includes CME-TEST located in the same city as CME-CORP but is on the university campus

The CME Computing Paradigm

Systems and capabilities required/planned at CME-Corporate include

• – A Windows-based network for server services and applications, file and print services, database applications (SQL, Oracle), Web services, and e-mail services

• – Mac clients for graphics arts and marketing

• – An AS400 for financials and CRM

• – Citrix Access Suite 4 for user access to most corporate applications

• – UNIX hosts for CAD applications and engineering

• – Citrix Presentation Server 4 on UNIX to allow non-UNIX hosts to access UNIX applications

• – VPN access for remote offices and roaming users (50 concurrent users)

• – Web-based access to Citrix services (up to 400 concurrent users)

• – Wireless LAN access to Citrix for conference rooms, meeting rooms, and roaming users. Wireless access, restricted to Internet access, may be required for visitors .

• – Dial-up access for roaming users who are unable to access an ISP (up to 20 concurrent users)

• – Applications: Cerna Epicare, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft CRM

The CME Business Model

The CME product integrates hardware, software, and logic; as such, it contains individually identifiable patient information (protected health information [PHI]) as defined by HIPPA, and requires a network that can be adjusted to support HIPPA security standards. The deployment of CME's second-generation product suite will require encryption of WAN links in the near future.

The CME corporate campus consolidates the CME "brain trust," and virtually all product development, design, and business strategy efforts are conducted there. Seamless interoperability with dispersed sales and regional offices, as well as the ability to share services and resources with the manufacturing plant, are essential. Senior staff members frequently travel from site to site and must have a consistent computing environment with access to necessary data and resources.

The CME regional offices are primarily tasked with sales support coordination and ensuring acceptance (technical and political/legal) of the CME product in their respective region.

Sales and support offices provide direct site survey, installation, and ongoing support for the CME medical module product. Per-site design and engineering are accomplished by the staff at CME-CORP.

CME learned from effective marketing strategies of other high-tech vendors and has deployed a "beta" test facility at the local university's Medical College. The test facility is staffed by rotating groups of CME employees who both provide real-world testing in a clinical environment and integrate with faculty, students, and clinicians. CME's strategy is to leverage their product into the academic side of the medical industry so that it becomes an essential tool in the industry at largewhat students and clinicians learn in school, they will demand in the workplace.

Corporate, regional, and sales office staff frequently travel to perspective customer and supplier sites and must have full access to corporate data and resources to do their jobs. Additionally, many employees require full home-based access to corporate applications to facilitate off-hours work, flexible schedules, and continuity for employees on temporary leave.

The CME Citrix Business Case

CME managers determined their current IT structure was both expensive and virtually unmanageable, given the large number of sites, time zones, and applications. Citrix was selected as the new paradigm and solved current problems. At the top level, CME's goals for their Citrix implementation were to

• – Reduce IT costs . Staff and hardware/software costs are skyrocketing as more sites are brought online. Most sales offices do not have " full-time " IT staff and have resorted to hiring temporary workers to try to keep systems up-to-date. Data distributed throughout the enterprise cannot be accessed easily, and sites are demanding increased bandwidth to support moving information from site to site. A prime target for hard cost reduction is the PC replacement budget. The ongoing cost of CME's five-year PC replacement cycle of 600 PCs per year represents a cost of over $720,000 per year.

• – Standardize applications and application deployment . Regional and sales offices are seldom on the same version or even the same applications for common office automation software. Regional versions of office automation products are purchased locally, deployed inconsistently, and incorrectly licensed. English versions of office automation products perform inconsistently on non-English OS platforms. New software versions are deployed at each site, and often the first site is deploying the next new version before the last site has the current version.

• – Provide consistent service irrespective of location . Employees who travel or work from home lack real-time access to most of the information they need. Staff have resorted to everything from instant messaging to remote control software to keep in touch and gain access to corporate information.

• – Provide the ability to rapidly activate new sites . CME projects a 50 percent increase in sales offices over the next three years . In many overseas locations, dedicated WAN access may be unavailable, take up to a year to install, or be cost prohibitive.

• – Provide a secure infrastructure that is extensible to meet U.S. (HIPPA, DoD) and foreign security requirements . Additionally, CME's technology is considered extremely proprietary and a likely target for industrial espionage. Dedicated WAN connectivity may require encryption to protect this information.