Novell announced that Continuum Health Partners, a 3,000-bed non-profit hospital system, chose Novell to secure, update and fully manage critical elements of its technology infrastructure. Novell will also implement a security and identity solution to give the clinical staff fast, secure access to patient information in order to continually improve patient care.

As a result of working with Novell, Continuum is improving security and access to critical applications, establishing a stable, efficient infrastructure and avoiding the $8 million cost of moving to a Microsoft environment by managing its Novell infrastructure more effectively, said the company.

“In three months, Novell stabilized our entire e-mail system and put us on a path to managing all our desktops,” said Ken Lobenstein, CTO of Continuum Services. “To us, that felt like overnight. We’ve made more progress in the last few months than we had in the previous two years.”

Novell IT Services maintains all Novell GroupWise e-mail, authentication, file and print services for Continuum as well as the Novell ZENworks infrastructure used to manage and patch more than 8,000 Microsoft Windows desktops. The Continuum environment is monitored 24 hours a day, 365 days a year from Novell's global network operations center.