Florida Cancer Specialists
Delivering Great Outcomes in Productivity

Founded in 1984, Florida Cancer Specialists & Research Institute (FCS) is one of the largest clinical research organizations in the U.S. At close to 100 locations throughout Florida, their team of 250+ physicians, 220 nurse practitioners, and 4,000 employees shares a commitment to ensuring that patients have access to world-class cancer care.

FCS has built a national reputation for excellence that is reflected in exceptional and compassionate patient care, driven by cutting-edge technologies and advanced treatments. They approach IT services and the delivery of a great digital employee experience with the same care; they know that their team’s employee experience plays a critical role in patient outcomes, so making sure they’re able to stay productive is vital. That’s why they chose ControlUp.

It all comes down to excellence in employee experience.

There are few things that cause more pain for a business than unhappy, unproductive employees. Nearly all of FCS’ applications are run in Citrixbased environments, so when there’s an outage, it affects everyone. And outages don’t just cost time. FCS estimates that for every hour of downtime, they lose around $25,000. That can add up fast. So when Jamie Terrell, Lead Citrix Engineer at Florida Cancer Associates, saw that complaints about slow logons and increased downtime were on the rise, he knew he had to find a solution… and find it fast.

What are three words you’d use to describe ControlUp?

“That’s easy,” Terrell says, “There for you. ControlUp is there for you.” Before joining FCS, Terrell had used ControlUp in other environments and he knew it would help them out. FCS did a Proof of Concept (PoC) with ControlUp that included what he calls his “problem child” applications and 1500 users. When we asked him how that went, he said, jokingly, “We bought it, didn’t we?” The team at FCS had evaluated solutions from other vendors, but Terrell says that it was the depth and breadth of script and automated actions, plus the data in ControlUp Insights, that made ControlUp the standout.

Since implementing ControlUp across their Citrix environment, Florida Cancer Specialists have been able to respond to problems quicker, which saves them precious time, not to mention money. Admins are able to spot issues and find their root causes right away, and they have set up triggers to handle and remediate chronic application problems automatically. Even better, the IT team is able to be proactive in its management of the environment instead of putting out fires all the time—freeing them up to do work that’s needed elsewhere—and their end-users are able to stay productive and happy.

What’s next for Florida Cancer Specialists & ControlUp?

With the COVID-19 pandemic keeping the world in its grip, Terrell says that FCS plans to upgrade to ControlUp Ultimate to take advantage of ControlUp Solve, as well as Edge DX and Remote DX, which will better support team members that work from home.

Since implementing ControlUp across their infrastructure, FCS has realized significant time and cost savings. Admins across the organization are able to see how their apps work within the Citrix environment and better understand how everything works together, and they have made great strides in reducing logon duration, cutting login times from over a minute, in some cases, to as little as ten seconds.

For Terrell and his team, he says if they had to do it all over again, they’d choose ControlUp every time. “The community,” he says, “is enormously helpful and the team at ControlUp wants you to succeed using the product; they’re not just looking for sales. That’s not something you can’t put a price tag on.”