Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust dumps Microsoft SCCM for Novell ZENworks

Microsoft SCCM 'unreliable' and was not able to provide enough accuracy, says trust

Royal Surrey County Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is to replace Microsoft's System Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) with Novell's ZENworks after the trust grew tired of what it deemed a lack of reliability and accuracy in Microsoft's solution.

SCCM and ZENworks are software tools that enable companies to manage groups of PCs and mobile devices running on different operating systems.

Peter Ridley, finance and informatics director of the NHS trust, said the Royal Surrey County Hospital has signed a multi-year deal for ZENworks because it was having trouble with the Microsoft system.

"We weren't getting the information we wanted from the Microsoft solution and its reliability was not meeting our stringent requirements. Providing accurate information to our auditors was highly resource-intensive and a major pain point for the trust, which resulted in pressure on our service desk and engineering teams. We needed to find a way of providing timely and accurate data to our auditors, so we started investigating what ZENworks could do for us," he said.

The trust undertook an investigation into the best solution to replace SCCM and discovered that many NHS trusts in Kent, Sussex and Surrey were already using ZENworks.

After speaking to these trusts, and following a proof-of-concept (POC) demonstration from Novell, the trust decided to go forward with plans to implement ZENworks.

According to Ridley, the new solution is already proving to be a good purchase.

"Now ZENworks is already providing us with reliable asset information, and the process of getting this data is much more efficient. We've made major gains in other areas too, such as software deployment, plus patch management is far more capable than with SCCM because it now covers numerous vendors with controllable deployment schedules," he said.

Financial terms and the length of the contract were not disclosed.