Agile, flexible, and scalable technology can provide a distinct competitive advantage in today’s increasingly competitive digital market. In many cases, agility and flexibility have evolved to become must-have competencies. They are needed to support fluctuations in server and storage system demand, a costly challenge for businesses to manage.
Beyond business needs, technology can also improve lives, as is the case with BCB Medical, whose recent migration to Dell APEX Flex on Demand is helping to enhance patient care.**
Enabling business growth through IT On Demand
BCB Medical, a healthcare IT company based in Finland, is a provider of software-as-a-Service solutions that collects, analyzes, and integrates data so that subscribing healthcare providers can monitor and improve patient care. BCB Medical’s business priorities are growth and expansion of capabilities. Future growth, however, is highly dependent on technology.
In order for BCB Medical to grow with market demand, modern, flexible IT is required to handle increased data requirements, integrate new analytic algorithms, and onboard new customers. According to the team at BCB Medical, in healthcare, the growth potential from using additional data alone is significant as 97% of the data collected in healthcare today remains unused. At the same time, the amount of clinical data generated is on the rise. Consequently, technology is at the heart of BCB Medical’s business and IT performance is a key enabler of growth and customer value.
The legacy technology architecture used by BCB Medical made it very difficult to expand, generating a disconnect between growth plans and technical capabilities. The company wanted to replace legacy systems with a more secure, scalable, and easier-to-manage solution. Due to regulations governing healthcare data and stringent security requirements, BCB Medical is unable to use the public cloud. To provide agility, security and cost-effectiveness, an ideal model for the healthcare IT company is an on-premises solution with a cloud-like consumption model.
Enter APEX Flex on Demand
The solution to BCB Medical’s IT growth initiative was APEX Flex on Demand. “Our goal was to improve IT performance, resiliency, and transition to lower infrastructure costs,” states Petteri Viljanen, CEO, BCB Medical. “We needed to align our technology to fit with our business objectives and waited years for a solution like APEX Flex on Demand,” he continues.
BCB Medical understood very quickly that APEX Flex on Demand was ideally suited for their current business and future growth plans. With APEX Flex on Demand, BCB Medical was able to scale and generate double digit business growth. APEX Flex on Demand allows companies to pay only for the technology capacity they need and then use ready buffer capacity that flexes up or down to meet fluctuating usage requirements. After adopting APEX Flex on Demand, BCB Medical recognized quantifiable benefits in business growth, as well as improved technology speed, security and cost-effectiveness.
24/7 easy-to-manage agility and scalability
As increasing amounts of clinical data are being generated, the timely collection, analysis and use of that data is a primary catalyst to improving patient treatments, reducing healthcare costs, advancing research at a faster pace, and creating stronger outcomes. BCB Medical provides those insights and must be at-the-ready to incorporate new data sources, adapt to data growth and to onboard new customers. Flexible computing capacity meets this need with immediate, 24/7 agility and scalability, while reducing costs to align with actual usage levels.
Mika Vuokko, Chief Information Office, BCB Medical says, “Being able to scale capacity ‘in-the-moment’ has been transformational for our business. We avoided the costs of overprovisioning, which has freed up cash for other areas, such as research and development.” Currently BCB Medical operates with 60% committed capacity and 40% ready-to-use buffer capacity.
BCB Medical accelerated their technology adoption timeline by using APEX Flex on Demand’s OpEx model. By comparison, a traditional CapEx model would have taken months to implement and would have hampered the company’s ability to scale quickly and meet mission-critical business needs.
30% savings, 20% less time, 10% more efficiency
BCB Medical found that, compared to the public cloud, APEX Flex on Demand is 30% more cost effective. At current scale, the new Dell Technologies platform runs BCB Medical’s 500-plus virtual machines.
In addition, BCB Medical has reduced the time and cost to implement software updates by 20% and also increased deployment efficiency by 10% with the APEX Flex on Demand solution. These benefits help to streamline IT and allocate time and resources away from infrastructure management and on to other, more pressing needs.
Beyond these noteworthy outcomes, BCB Medical can better plan for growth with the more accurate predictability of IT costs. Vuokko observes, “The predictability of APEX Flex on Demands means we know what our IT costs are likely to be in three to five years’ time.”
Built on security
“We build our products and services for our customers to use based on total security,” says Viljanen. To ensure compliance with Finnish healthcare data security regulations, APEX Flex on Demand enables BCB Medical to maintain control of its data – a key requirement for a healthcare IT company. Privacy and data security are paramount across the healthcare industry and underpin any technology architecture and solution.
“Dell Technologies is enabling us to provide safer products faster and help our customers who can then provide better healthcare for their patients,” shares Viljanen. Combining the security, flexibility, scalability and cost-effectiveness of BCB Medical’s new technology approach has created a pathway for rapid future growth. In turn, this will aid in improving healthcare outcomes and, most importantly, patient lives.
For additional information, please see the BCB Medical video and read more in their customer story.
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