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“We want to empower our clinical professionals to request, obtain and consume business applications and services quickly and reliably, in an environment that’s as easy and intuitive as downloading an app from iTunes,” said Christine Walters, Associate Director for IM&T at Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. “We needed to prepare, package and make applications available in our app store quickly using a strategic, integrated solution.”

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust intends to drastically reduce application request wait times and increase user satisfaction by implementing App Portal as the front-end, self-service enterprise app store, supported by AdminStudio to streamline Windows XP-to-Windows 7, and .MSI-to-Microsoft App-V conversions, application testing, remediation, packaging and hand off to the app store to populate the application catalog.

The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust had been facing challenges as its 10,000 system users experienced slow and inconsistent manual support for application requests and installations (users routinely had to wait up to seven plus days for request fulfillment). The Trust’s vision was to empower users to request, obtain and consume applications without needing IT services, and make those applications available to users on their device-of-choice. And it had to deliver this functionality while streamlining the hospital’s migration from Windows XP to Windows 7 and virtualisation initiative, converting .MSI’s to Microsoft App-V format.

It undertook a search for an integrated solution that could provide the front-end, self-service enterprise app store that would be intuitive and familiar to clinicians – empowering them to easily find and download the apps they needed. But the app store also had to seamlessly tie to the Application Readiness process that would enable IT to automate testing, fixing, packaging and migration of applications to the target environments and populate the app store.

App Portal’s modular and vendor-agnostic approach was key to Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust’s decision, as integration with their current technologies was critical. Of equal importance was Flexera Software’s expertise as the developer of AdminStudio. That solution will enable their efficient Windows 7 and App-V virtualisation projects, and it will also be used to populate the app store catalog to ensure the right users have access to the right apps on the right devices to do their jobs. “We look at this from a holistic perspective – datacenter to end-user device,” said Jason Birchall, IM&T Project Manager & Enterprise Architect at Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust. “Making apps available to our clinicians in a reliable way in a short timeframe is an essential part of this project. It must go right the first time. The best way to make this happen is to go to a provider that does it all. This is what Flexera Software does.”

While App Portal and AdminStudio Suite were selected to solve the hospital’s immediate need of enabling its consumerisation of IT and BYOD strategies – Flexera Software’s ability to provide a third, longer term solution, cemented its decision. App Portal also integrates seamlessly with the company’s market-leading Software Licence Optimisation solution, FlexNet Manager Suite, which provides visibility into and control of IT assets, reduces ongoing software costs, and helps ensure continuous license compliance. “Licence management is important. It’s good to know Flexera Software has the whole ecosystem to help us get the most from our software assets. It’s something to look at when we’re farther along.”

While the hospital’s enterprise app store has not yet gone live, Jason Birchall reports that word has already spread among the medical professionals – and enthusiasm is mounting. “We have set this up so that the timeframe for getting an app to the clinician, which used to take as long as seven days, will take as little as fifteen minutes. Our team is very excited – they can’t wait to see it. I’m confident we can significantly improve clinical and patient service.”

Christine Walters believes that “Flexera’s App Portal solution will help the IM&T Department to deliver its services to its consumers in a faster, more efficient and safer manner”.