Medifast Success Story
Medifast trims downtime with Zenoss appliance
Back in early 2006, the MediFast executive team realized that in order to achieve their goal of growing top line revenues from $80 million to $150 million per year, they needed a healthy and reliable IT system. A new CIO was hired and tasked to establish a scalable IT system.
"When I first joined MediFast, the company was working in a reactive mode to IT production failures," said John Hamilton, CIO of MediFast. "MediFast had grown very successfully, but its IT department had failed to keep up with it."
Hamilton quickly took inventory and realized that MediFast used a predominantly Windows-based environment. He also realized that he had to build an IT team from scratch as his team lacked domain expertise to deploy a sophisticated IT management solution.
The Solution
Hamilton searched for an IT management solution that was Linux-based to avoid the vulnerabilities of Windows, and one that could be deployed effortlessly without relying on internal resources. He selected Zenoss Enterprise to increase the availability and performance of its IT systems. Hamilton noted, "Zenoss buys you time. You save the time it would take to get things up and running, and time equals money."
MediFast deployed Zenoss Enterprise within a few hours, and was immediately able to automatically discover its IT networks and components, including a few that were not previously documented. Zenoss helped create a model-based Configuration Management Database (CMBD), and enabled MediFast IT to deploy monitoring for business-critical areas of the system. The Zenoss solution provided full monitoring capabilities for MediFast's heterogeneous IT environment and helped eliminate the need to deploy multiple tools.
MediFast SysAdmin, Alpana Nangpal, stated, "In a typical day, if there are any alerts, I receive an email from Zenoss on my PDA. Since Zenoss is web-based, I can log in from anywhere to check the details of the alert, and take corrective actions as necessary. If Zenoss is alerting about a service outage, customers can identify the source and restart it." Nangpal continued, "When I come in to work, I look at the Events Console, my pre-configured charts, reports, performance of applications, and response times to look for pro-active measures I can take in order to avert future production problems."
The Results
MediFast realized the benefits of Zenoss within a few hours as performance degradations were proactively discovered and production failures averted. Zenoss also helped lower unplanned downtime of the company's e-commerce site. MediFast calculated that one hour of downtime results in a loss of $30K in earnings. Prior to deploying Zenoss, MediFast had experienced 2 major production failures that caused 12 hours of downtime and a loss of $360,000. With Zenoss managing the infrastructure, the MediFast e-commerce site is available and performing.
Zenoss also provides Medifast the capability to detect performance degradations with 3rd party solutions and enables the company to enforce service level agreements with its partners.
By using Zenoss, Hamilton's team can configure and automate their IT systems, lowering the need for human intervention. This allows the MediFast IT team to scale and become more productive as the company grows its operations. "Zenoss buys you time. You save the time it would take to get things up and running, and time equals money," said Hamilton.
"I was extremely happy to find a Linux-based IT management solution that could work in a heterogeneous environment and not be susceptible to Windows' security vulnerabilities," said Hamilton. "The return on investment for Zenoss was 100% realized within 30 days of the deployment."
About MediFast
MediFast is a leader among easy-to-use, clinically proven portioncontrolled weight loss programs. MediFast has been recommended by 15,000 physicians and used by over one million customers. MediFast programs have been proven effective through studies by major teaching university hospitals. The company sells its products and programs via four unique distribution channels:
- The web and national call centers
- National network of physicians
- Medically supervised MediFast Weight Control Centers
- The Take Shape for Life direct-selling division
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