VAR500: Federal IT Mobile Device Usage, Health Care In The Cloud

VAR500 Solution Providers In The News

North America's largest revenue-generating solution providers are making headlines, one by offering global health-care IT solutions, one by researching mobility trends and one by helping customers test software in the cloud.

Here are the recent happenings at VAR500 companies, including CDW, Xerox, Cognizant, Logicalis and Sogeti.

Government Grows In Mobile Device Usage

More than half of federal employees use at least one mobile device at work, CDW Government found in its first Federal Mobility Report, and many are using personal devices to accomplish work-related tasks. The report, which surveyed 414 federal employees and IT staff, found that mobility is no longer just a nice-to-have capability. Nearly all 203 federal IT professionals (99 percent) said they have deployed mobile devices to their agency workforce, and 62 percent said their agencies let employees use personal devices for work. The bring-your-own-device trend is likely to continue, following President Obama's November 2011 executive order that asked agencies to limit the number of IT devices they issue to employees in order to reduce costs.

Xerox Cloud Services Help Manage Mobile Device Sprawl

Xerox’s cloud-based mobile device management (MDM) service is aimed at helping companies currently struggling to manage the pervasive growth of mobile devices. The new MDM service can simplify how companies implement and incorporate every type of device used throughout their organization. MDM eases the challenge of complicated technical implementation and oversight, as well as hardware and software costs. "Companies, large and small, struggle with how to identify, secure and track a host of mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops. Employees use them 24x7, anywhere and everywhere, and they need them all to connect and sync seamlessly," said Ken Stephens, Xerox senior vice president of cloud services. ’We keep it secure, simple and cost-effective.’

Cognizant Streamlines Hospital Process

Cognizant recently deployed a comprehensive Hospital Performance Management (HPM) solution at Hunterdon Healthcare, a nonprofit health-care organization in Flemington, N.J.

The HPM solution leverages InterSystems DeepSee embedded realtime analytics technology and decision support to help Hunterdon improve safety and quality of care delivery, enhance operational efficiencies, and optimize resource utilization and hospital throughput. It also lets Hunterdon systematically measure, track and analyze key performance indicators, rapidly analyze data, and identify trends and new business opportunities.

Logicalis Enterprise Cloud Powers Health-Care IT

Health-care IT professionals have plenty of clinical image data gathered, including X-rays and MRIs. Although those images aren't constantly accessed, when they are, they require a great deal of bandwidth. Logicalis' enterprise-class public cloud offering now works with the TeraMedica Evercore Clinical Enterprise Suite to provide greater flexibility in intelligent clinical image life-cycle management. In addition, it simplifies data storage, while reducing operating costs. "Our cloud solution for TeraMedica customers is built from a flexible computing architecture that provides the computing power, memory, storage and bandwidth for an off-site archiving of medical images," said Mike Martin, Logicalis' vice president of cloud solutions.

Sogeti Cloud Solution Aids In Software Testing

Janova and Sogeti will be working together to provide a quality assurance tool for customers. Janova develops cloud-based, automated software testing tools, and Sogeti plans to offer the solution as a quality assurance tool for its consulting work. Sogeti is a subisidiary of VAR500 IT solution provider Capgemini. The testing tool is an alternative for customers who currently either test software manually, or who can't afford traditional automated tools, because they often charge large up-front license fees and require other hardware.