Air Products Equips Expanding Workforce with On-demand Information Access

Industrial gas, equipment and chemical supplier selects software to enables rapid integration of acquisitions, increase productivity

Industrial gas, equipment and chemical supplier selects software to enables rapid integration of acquisitions, increase productivity

Fort Lauderdale, FL — April 4, 2005 — Air Products, a worldwide supplier of industrial gases and equipment, specialty and intermediate chemicals, and environmental and energy systems, said it has standardized on Citrix access infrastructure to centralize the management of its medical division's enterprise applications.

A Citrix customer since 1994, the $7.4 billion company recently used Citrix to integrate disparate technologies from several newly acquired healthcare businesses.

Using the Citrix access infrastructure, according to Air Products, the company's 20,000 engineers, technicians, and sales personnel across the Americas, Europe, and Asia were able to work from the same centralized IT infrastructure, thereby increasing employee productivity and improving global business operations.

During the last six months, Air Products' homecare subsidiary and one of the largest healthcare providers in the United States, Air Products Medical, needed to centralize its IT infrastructure after acquiring several medical homecare services companies located throughout Europe. With such vigorous acquisition activity, Air Products' IT staff was challenged to provide anytime, anywhere, any-device, any-connection access for 250 additional users across the extended enterprise, while preventing technical interruptions associated with integrating newly acquired business units into the parent organization.

Air Products' IT staff used Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server to centrally roll out applications from its Allentown, Pa., headquarters and provide remote access to employees no matter where they are. This one step accelerated delivery of a full range of business applications and saved the extensive travel costs involved with traditional on-site application installations, the company said.

Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server also provides a secure, centralized platform for Air Products to meet government regulations such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA). The IT department is also able to observe, monitor and measure access resources so they may understand what employees are using, measure how often they access information and applications and to what extent.

Additionally, Citrix access infrastructure has a multi-dimensional approach to security, which provides protection for organizations with the strictest security requirements. The Secure by Design capabilities of MetaFrame Presentation server give IT administrators greater control over what employees are able to access, creating a regulation-compliant IT system that protects sensitive healthcare information, like patient records and data, from being accessed by unauthorized users.

"With several healthcare acquisitions across Europe concluding simultaneously, we looked to MetaFrame Presentation Server to quickly manage a massive sprawl of new employees and integrate new applications into our existing global IT infrastructure while strictly adhering to HIPAA requirements," said Steve Trask, IT systems manager at Air Products. "The centralized management of enterprise applications allows us to safeguard confidential healthcare data in accordance with international privacy laws, yet still provide the newest members of the Air Products' team with on-demand access to important business information."

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