Intel-Based Servers Drive McKesson-HBOC's On-Line Customer Accounts Receivable System

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 13, 2000 - McKessonHBOC, the world's largest healthcare supply management and information technology company, has adopted Intel®-based servers to power a new e-Commerce solution for its customer base of pharmacies and hospitals.

McKessonHBOC is a Fortune 60 company that provides supply management, information technology and pharmaceutical services to nearly 250 million corporate customers. The company manages an average of $2 billion in receivables and processes 450,000 sales orders each week. To handle the high volume of requests for copies of invoices from busy hospital and independent pharmacies, McKessonHBOC needed to replace costly manual entry, phone and fax communications with a streamlined, interactive system.

McKesson turned to Proxicom, an e-Business service provider, to design an Intel-based server-side customer order management system for the Internet. Called ARLink, it is part of the Electronic Automated Solutions Environment (E.A.S.E.) network that pharmacies access with their Web browsers.

Server Cluster Runs With E.A.S.E.
The E.A.S.E. applications already run on Intel dual-processor-based IBM* NetFinity* servers. With the number of customers connected to the system expected to triple to more than 9,000 by the end of the year, McKessonHBOC is adding more Intel® Pentium® III Xeon™ processor-based IBM NetFinity servers.

By hosting the E.A.S.E. environment on Intel architecture-based servers, the company can scale performance incrementally by adding servers to the cluster, minimizing cost and maintaining outstanding reliability through automatic failover.

John Amos, vice president of SAP Programs at McKessonHBOC, lauded their reliability. "They've worked great. We haven't had any problem with the Intel-based systems - we plug them in and they work, and by dropping in more, we can handle more than triple our present workload."

"Pound for pound, this project is enormous," said Amos. He figures that the E.A.S.E. program will pay for itself in less than one year.

For more information about how McKessonHBOC and other companies are building their e-Business infrastructures on Intel solutions, please visit www.intel.com/eBusiness.

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