Austin Radiological Association X-Rays Network Internals Using CA's Unicenter TNG.

ISLANDIA, N.Y.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August 4,1998--

Texas Radiology Group Improves Service Levels, Lowers Total Cost of Ownership by Rolling Out Enterprise Management in 20 Days

Computer Associates International, Inc. (CA) today announced that Austin Radiological Association (ARA), one of the largest radiology service providers in Texas, has selected Unicenter TNG to help promote network reliability, improve responsiveness, and reduce total costs of ownership.

A doctor-owned, privately held organization with 15 sites in the greater Austin metropolitan area, ARA was up against a fragile network, limited security, inadequate asset management, no virus protection, and a labor-intensive monitoring process that could not keep up with growth.

ARA's primary concern was ongoing network performance and availability. The company was dissatisfied with the reliability of its main application, the distributed patient-scheduling/patient-accounts-receivable system. This mission-critical system schedules radiology services and manages patients' accounts at ARA's facilities. When it goes down the company losses are calculated at $16,000-$18,000 per hour.

Unicenter TNG was implemented during a 20-day period. "It was a perfect fit for us and the implementation went very easily, with the support of CA and our internal IT department' said R. Todd Thomas, director of information services. "Even after installation was completed, CA provided the best vendor support I have ever seen." The company has rolled out Unicenter TNG on Windows NT, DOS, Windows 95, and AIX with specific functionality for event management, asset management, anti-virus, advanced storage options, network response time management and tape management.

In addition to Unicenter TNG, the company considered IBM/Tivoli TME, Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, Microsoft's SMS, and Fluke Enterprise' LANmeter used in conjunction with Cisco's Net X-Ray product. ARA rejected the use of a network of point solutions as too cumbersome and difficult to integrate and maintain. "When we compared the cumulative price of point solutions against Unicenter TNG, we found that Unicenter TNG was actually less expensive," said Thomas.

Based on ARA's evaluation, the company concluded that Unicenter TNG was the only fully integrated solution that met all of ARA's needs across multiple platforms. "We were very pleased to see how well Unicenter TNG scaled to our functional as well as financial requirements," Thomas said.

ARA can already point to evidence that Unicenter TNG has helped reduce mission-critical system's downtime. First, the automation enabled by Unicenter TNG's powerful event management capabilities does a much better job of detecting network events and alerting technicians to impending pproblems.

"We have already seen increases in system availability that can be traced to Unicenter TNG's ability to give us diagnostic information much faster than ever before," Thomas said.

Unicenter TNG arms ARA with critical information that the company uses to pinpoint the exact origin of network outages. In the past, the company could not always be sure if an individual outage was traceable to a problem with the telephone company or an ARA router or software application. "The result was we always played a series of round-robins with the phone company: A 'it's your equipment,' 'no it's not, it's your equipment,' scenario."

ARA is planning to configure Unicenter TNG to automatically act upon broken links it detects in the WAN. If a link goes down, Unicenter TNG will dial into the router and display all the router's log files at a centralized operations point. Armed with this information, the company will often be able to diagnose and repair the problem before the users are even aware of it. If Unicenter TNG determines that the problem does lie with the telephone company, specific diagnostic information is often helpful in getting the phone company to address the problem faster. "For us, this capability is extremely powerful. Some of our sites are open 7 days a week. For IS staff to be paged when an outage occurs on the weekend is something that we can use to keep our systems operating close to 24 hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week."

Thomas credits Unicenter TNG with reducing the time window to detect and diagnose network outages from hours to five minutes or less.

Unicenter TNG's asset management function will figure prominently in ARA's Year 2000 compliance strategy. Like everyone else, the company is concerned that its desktops and the applications they are running will operate when the calendar turns the century mark. ARA will use asset management to interrogate the BIOS (Basic Input Output System) of all the workstations and desktops on the network to determine if they are Year 2000 compliant as established by the hardware vendor. If not, ARA can take appropriate steps to upgrade the BIOS. In the same way, asset management will reveal whether system and application software packages physically residing on machines across the network need to be upgraded.

Unicenter TNG is an integrated enterprise management solution that enables organizations to manage all IT resources, encompassing heterogeneous networks, systems, applications, and databases. It provides comprehensive end-to-end enterprise management for TCP/IP, SNA, IPX/SPX and DECnet networks, and 40 platforms including desktops, Windows NT, UNIX, AS/400, NetWare and mainframe environments.

Unicenter TNG is the only fully integrated management solution covering network discovery, topology, performance, events and status, security, software distribution, storage, workload, help desk, change management and other functions for traditional and distributed computing environments, as well as for the Internet and intranets. Unicenter TNG's intelligent manager/agent technology delivers highly scalable management of the entire computing environment, including hardware and software.

Computer Associates International, Inc. (NYSE: CA), with headquarters in Islandia, N.Y., is the world leader in mission-critical business software. The company develops, licenses and supports more than 500 integrated products that include enterprise computing and information management, application development, manufacturing and financial applications. CA has over 11,000 people in 160 offices in 43 countries and had revenue of $4.7 billion in fiscal year 1998. CA can be reached by visiting http://www.cai.com, emailing [e-mail], or calling 1-516-342-5224.

Austin Radiological Association is a doctor-owned privately held organization, headquartered in Austin Texas, with annual revenues of roughly $30,000,000. With 15 sites in the greater Austin metropolitan area, ARA is one of the largest radiology service providers in Texas. Austin Radiological Association can be reached by writing 6101 W Courtyard Drive, Suite 5, Austin, TX 78730. Telephone [phone] or fax [phone].

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    CONTACT: Diane Bolkas, 516-342-3697 or [e-mail]