CONCORD, NH – Concord Hospital, a regional medical center in New Hampshire's capital city, has chosen a vendor to build its high-performance IT network infrastructure.

The medical center, which boasts the second busiest acute care hospital in the state, inked the technology and services deal with Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Juniper Networks, a company with which it already had a strong relationship.

"In healthcare, the importance of secure, real-time access to applications goes well beyond the need to expedite employee productivity or quickly meet business requirements - it literally can mean the difference between life and death," said Mark Starry, manager of IT infrastructure and security at Concord Hospital.

Concord Hospital is in the midst of a major IT initiative to consolidate a suite of clinical and administrative applications from its healthcare centers, clinics and physician practices located across 11 locations.

"Like most high-performance businesses, we need to ensure our health professionals can work without network interruption, regardless of their location," Starry added. "Concord Hospital views the network as a critical component for our organization in delivering exceptional service."

Starry said the consolidation caused huge network latency for the medical center's Web-based applications. To resolve this issue, Concord Hospital deployed Juniper's WX application acceleration platform. The vendor installed its WXC 590 at the data center and WX 500s and WX 250s at 10 remote sites, said Starry.