PROVO, Utah Dec. 03, 2003 — Health First in Florida operates around the clock to provide quality patient care, and the same 24/7 reliability is expected from its network that connects 6,500 employees in three hospitals and dozens of healthcare facilities. While organizations worldwide have been losing billions of dollars in downtime due to recent viruses, Health First has remained secure due to a Novell solution that distributes anti-virus updates and protects against virus attacks.

Health First uses Novell ZENworks to distribute weekly anti-virus updates to its Novell NetWare and Microsoft Windows servers, and urgent updates can be downloaded and quickly sent out across the organization. By mitigating potential attacks, Health First has avoided downtime that could have cost the organization an estimated $250,000 per hour. With ZENworks, only one person is needed to centrally manage the software distribution of 400 different applications, greatly increasing IT staff productivity and significantly reducing travel time and costs.

"ZENworks is unequivocally the one product we've purchased where we've gotten the biggest bang for our buck - hands down," said Dan Tesenair, Health First supervisor of corporate systems. "We can download a virus patch and get it out to 3,500 workstations in 30 locations in a matter of minutes."

With Novell GroupWise, virus attacks such as Sobig.F and MSBlaster that infected organizations worldwide, affected just one percent of Health First's machines and only because of users opening attachments. Because the GroupWise Address Book is secure, the virus was unable to spread to other users. Health First also selected Novell NetWare, Novell eDirectory, Novell DirXML and Novell BorderManager to secure the confidential information on its systems and to manage increasing IT costs.

"With Novell, we spend less time on administration and user issues and more time on technologies that give us a competitive advantage and improve patient care," said Tesenair. "I can't even think of running an IT shop without Novell and the amount of support and staff we would need with any other solution."

Press Contact:
Rod Anderson
Novell, Inc
Phone: (801) 861-3407
E-mail: roanderson@novell.com