Heartland Financial Selects Softricity Virtualization to Support Aggressive Growth; Softricity Enables Centralized IT Operations for Regional Banks, Cuts Deployment and Help Desk Call Times by 80%, Enhances SOX Compliance and Security

Business Wire, Oct 31, 2005

BOSTON -- Softricity(R) today announced that Heartland Financial USA, Inc., a $2.7 billion bank holding company (NASDAQ: HTLF), has selected the Softricity Desktop to facilitate centralized support of its nearly 60 banking locations across nine states. Using Softricity, Heartland accelerated company-wide application deployments and upgrades by up to 80%, cut the time needed to handle help desk calls by four-fifths, and made it much easier to ensure security and Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance for its applications.

Heartland is in aggressive acquisition and growth mode, doubling assets and earnings every 5 years - a goal that has been accomplished the past 15 years. Twenty seven locations have been added in the past six years, and planning to add approximately 25 more during the next two years. Technology is crucial to the company's success.

"Our banks are independently chartered, but we consolidate as many of the operations as possible at headquarters for cost containment and efficiency purposes," said Marti Vandemore, Vice President, Information Services, Heartland. "To this end, we've always been committed to adopting new, enabling technologies. However, even with a sophisticated electronic software distribution (ESD) approach, managing IT for all our locations was extremely difficult and resource-consuming. Softricity made it possible for us to centralize application management, and actually cut the amount of time and resources needed substantially, while providing even better end-user support."

RapidApp, a Softricity Certified Consulting Partner, handled Heartland's Softricity implementation. Since completing it earlier this year, Heartland has been able to:

--Convert to a centralized terminal services model for all banks, handling more than 100 diverse applications with one server. "Our enterprise-wide transformation would have been impossible without Softricity. Without it we couldn't accurately budget the project because we could not anticipate the number of silos and servers needed to run conflicting applications. With Softricity, there are no application conflicts, which made it easy to scope and budget the project and gain approval to proceed," said Vandemore.

--Cut deployment time by 80% and enable instant terminations. In the past, Heartland used an ESD solution for company-wide deployments. However, because of time-consuming regression testing needed to ensure applications wouldn't conflict once installed, it often took a full week or more to deploy a single application. Once deployed the failure rate was often as high as 50%. Heartland never uninstalled applications when they were no longer needed by the user because it was too time-consuming to physically do so on each computer. With Softricity, it takes just one day to deploy an application, deployments are successful 98% of the time, and testing for conflicts is completely eliminated. Heartland can also easily terminate applications by simply removing the user's rights from Active Directory.

--Improve change management for SOX compliance. RapidApp established a change management process to help Heartland ensure applications that have financial impact will comply with SOX. Because SoftGrid applications do not impact one another, testing upgrades and patches for conflicts is no longer needed, substantially simplifying the process and making compliance significantly easier.

--Speed upgrades for enhanced security. Many of Heartland's 125 applications require updates twice a year. If they don't stay current on new releases and patches, the applications may be exposed and at much greater security risk. Softricity enables upgrades to be deployed in one-fifth of the time previously required, enabling Heartland to keep current with critical security updates.

--Cut help desk call time by 80%. Heartland has 4 help desk people supporting 800 users. Before using Softricity, they could easily spend 2 hours on the phone to resolve a single user's problem. Now, it typically takes less than 10 minutes to solve the same problem because applications - and their issues - are isolated, and applications can instantly be refreshed.

--Simplify disaster recovery planning. In the past, restoring applications required re-installing each one on each computer on which it runs. Within Heartland's new terminal services model, server images are also dependent on the hardware - a HP server vs. a Dell server, for example. "Softricity removes the dependency issue because applications are independent of the hardware, and no applications need to be installed. Now in our disaster recovery plan, we can easily rebuild terminal services servers without application installation and without worrying about hardware particulars," says Shane Nicely, Assistant Vice President, Information Services, Heartland.

The Softricity Desktop transforms Windows applications from products that must be installed and managed locally into virtual services that are centrally managed and deployed on-demand--without any recoding--to any desktop, server or laptop. As part of this solution, Softricity's patented SoftGrid's application virtualization technology enables applications to run in a protected "sandbox" environment without installation or alteration to the host operating system. This eliminates the regression testing typically needed prior to deployment of new applications, upgrades and patches, accelerating the entire management process.