Southern Cross University uses LabStats to review usage data from over 1000 student-facing computers and adjust software budgets to meet students’ needs.
Southern Cross University (SCU) is a public university at the southern end of the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia.
SCU has been using LabStats for 10 years and the IT team currently monitors 1,000 machines across 3 campuses.
We interviewed Paul Brown, Manager of Customer Service and Kelly Stewart, Desktop Services Team Lead on their experience with LabStats. Here’s what they had to say:
Southern Cross University – LabStats
Use Cases
Hot Desks
Paul’s team gets a lot of requests for hotdesks, so understanding how they are used helps better plan for capacity. Hotdesks are computers and laptop docking stations for staff. When a new request comes in, they use LabStats to look at the hours of utilization of nearby stations. They’re able to make decisions based on facts, rather than guessing or asking people how well used the spaces are.
Funding and Space
LabStats is called upon whenever there’s pressure on budget or space. There have been instances where a lab is identified as underutilized, and Paul’s team has been able to remove some of the workstations and reuse that space for other purposes.
Application Management
Kelly and her team often have a lot of software that gets installed for a future session. LabStats enables them to determine whether or not that software is required throughout the year, so they can better manage the standard operating environment.
Experience with LabStats
Paul shared a few of his experiences with LabStats’ support, updates and the overall return on investment:
LabStats Support
“The LabStats support team has always been very responsive. Despite the timezone differences they’re always available. I’ve had several conversations with representatives where they phoned me up during my business hours, which has been really helpful. We’re very happy with the work that they’ve done for us.”
Updates
“They’re always making us aware of updates; there’s a good channel for letting us know when things are about to change. For instance, I know the API is changing later on this year, and we’ve got plenty of notice to make changes to our integration to that API before the new one goes live.”
ROI
“LabStats represents a very good return on the investment. We find we use it a lot to provide data to allow the decision making process to be based on facts. I think it would be very difficult to have those conversations without LabStats providing that information for us.”
Interested in learning how other colleges and universities are using LabStats?
