A pioneer in robotic-assisted surgery chose Avatier to automate password resets and account provisioning, dramatically reducing technician workload and accelerating employee onboarding.
Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, Intuitive Surgical developed the revolutionary da Vinci system to assist surgeons in minimally invasive robotic surgery. After merging with its rival Computer Motion in 2003, the company grew at an unprecedented rate. Today, it is a publicly traded company (NASDAQ: ISRG) that holds over $4 million in total assets. Thanks to the company’s consistent strong performance, it is traded on the S&P 500. In 2000, da Vinci was the first robotic surgical system to be cleared by the FDA for general laparoscopic surgery. This important milestone was just the first of many; eventually, da Vinci was also cleared for numerous other procedure types for which it remains a gold standard in the industry. Intuitive Surgical remains the global leader in robotic-assisted minimally-invasive surgery. In order to support the company’s growth, IT Operations director David Loudermilk knew that he needed to streamline IT processes. One area that needed improvement was the company’s password-related account maintenance. At the time, account-related inquiries were taking technicians away from the other tasks that they had been hired to do, wasting time and resources to resolve a problem that could be handled much more efficiently. For help achieving this goal, Mr. Loudermilk chose Avatier’s Password Station and Identity Enforcer. Within only a few days, he knew that he had made a good decision.
The easy rollout was impressive at meeting the company's immediate needs.
“We first bought Password Station from Avatier, and we brought it in and it was a very easy rollout. It took us three or four days to get it into the system, and we were up and running with the proof of concept to be able to change passwords from a user endpoint at will,” Mr. Loudermilk explains. The easy rollout was impressive at meeting the company’s immediate needs, and gave Mr. Loudermilk additional ideas for ways that other Avatier products could further automate repetitive processes and free up technician time. Avatier offered a fast deployment timeframe that was simple to install and support, and Mr. Loudermilk knew that it would be important to take advantage of additional tools. His team ultimately decided to implement the entire Avatier Identity and Access Management Suite (AIMS) to take advantage of the account setup, role creation, user management, and determination tools. Getting started with AIMS was just as simple as the initial installation. According to Mr. Loudermilk, “Since we already had Avatier’s existing infrastructure in house, it was very easy for them to come in and turn this on for us, and get us started in creating privileges and roles in defining what a user gets when they’re onboarded.” Thanks to AIMS, many formerly labor-intensive processes such as password resets and account setups are now automated for huge time savings. “We’ve gone from an average of 1.5-3 hours’ average for user account creation and setup across all our systems to under five minutes for any given user in the company for full access and account setup.”