Beaumont Hospital

“JBoss's Open Source software has helped Beaumont Hospital to significantly reduce its license costs. At the same time, Beaumont is now more independent of third party proprietary software, and through JBoss, enjoys better flexibility for its middleware architecture .”

-Tony Kerry, Beaumont Hospital I.T. Manager .

Company Overview: Beaumont Hospital is a government-funded hospital that provides acute care services across 54 medical specialties and is the national Irish referral centre for Neurosciences and Renal Transplantation. The Hospital offers both in-patient, day patient, out-patient and casualty services to the population which it serves.

Challenge:

Beaumont Hospital was under severe financial pressure, and was looking for ways to make considerable cost savings. “…it is hard to conceive of an operation of such complexity as health… being managed effectively with the current minimum level of funding of information systems.” (Deloitte & Touche, 2001)
The I.T. manager needed to get the best possible return for the tax-payers’ money, as the hospital is largely funded from government funds.
Users should experience little or no disruption within their work environment, nor need to relearn skills for new software.

Solution:

Beaumont committed to the development of JAVA/J2EE technology as its principal reference architecture for software construction.
Hospital staff investigated Open Source options over a period of six months, and downloaded various OSS applications for experimentation purposes. The hospital selected the Open Source JBoss product as an application server, and bought JBoss consultancy to support the set-up.
The current I.T. environment features 36 Intel-based servers.

Results:

The immediate savings compared with purchase of the leading proprietary products amounted to £200,000.
The extra functionality available in the open source systems deployed allowed for a richer overall feature set.
An outright anticipated overall saving of 13 million Euros on project costs.