Customer Background

Our customer, founded in 1961, is a leading health care company that offers a wide range of insurance products and health and wellness services. With over 30 years of experience in the Medicare program, they are one of the nation's top providers of Medicare Advantage benefits with approximately 2.5 million members and over 20 million medical members nationwide and in specialty.

Technology Used

The products and technologies used in this implementation effort by our team for the customer were,

• IBM DataPower
• IBM Integration Bus
• IBM API Management
• Apigee Edge
• IBM WSRR
• Splunk
• Informatica
• SnapLogic
• In-Memory Grid Solutions
• CoreMetrics
• IBM ODM
• IBM MQ
• CA Lisa

The Business Challenge

Our customer wanted to move towards a more agile integration model where they could connect rapidly and extend their services in a uniform fashion. Some of the pain points that they had were,

• Duplicate (or) Overlapping services of differing quality, semantics and data abstractions
• Difficult to identify what has already been built and what purpose it serves
• High discovery and coordination costs for new initiatives around existing services and their usage
• Difficult to consistently apply foundational patterns such as security, data isolation and versioning
• Service consumers and providers were finding it harder to reconcile their needs
• Significant resiliency issues in the customer's production environment
• Poor time-to-market on new business opportunities that seek to leverage combinations of existing enterprise capabilities

Our Solution and Support

The customer partnered with us to achieve and create a 'high quality and scalable reference architecture' for various business transformation related initiatives. Our team helped to build a holistic approach to strengthening integration capabilities (between core systems, with external partners, developer communities, and cloud platforms), and discussed mechanisms to empower engineering teams to 'connect the dots' across the Enterprise Architecture - in a way that builds lasting competencies.

In some of the business applications the architecture was used for Real-Time Remote Monitoring, Practice Management EMR, Enhanced Clinical and Population Health Analytics, Externalize Care Hub, Consumer Centric Ecosystem, CRM, and Digital Hub. The goal of the solution was to reduce cost, risk, and complexity of managing and patching endpoints. Some of the major aspects that our teams supported for our customers were,

• Designed an architecture to build Architectural patterns, Design Patterns, Standards and Implementation guides for below mentioned technology stack
• Designed and coordinated in building Enterprise Application (EA) Competency Center and IT learning self-service portals
• Designed and build applications/APIs using IBM API Management and Apigee Edge platforms in conjunction with Enterprise Service Bus
• Developed and delivered the enterprise application using our Global Delivery model through SCRUM agile methodology to produce product features at a faster pace to meet challenging timelines
• Designed and build Location Service API (Geo Coding/Geo Fencing) which provides capability to get direction between two location points using http reques;. This is the common utility service that will be used by different business lines
• Enterprise logging - Common proxy created as template to log errors to common framework through REST API; This will be used by each developer to create business services (Components involved - IBM Integration Bus, Apigee Edge, DataPower, Splunk)
• Secure Token Service is a system that issues software tokens to authenticate users (people or systems) and these tokens allow web and mobile applications to verify that a user has valid credentials without need to see the user's id and password (Components involved - Apigee Edge and IBM DataPower)

Customer Benefits

Through our innovative solution and strong delivery team, we were able to assist customer in achieving their strategic goals in short time frame. The Enterprise Integration COE helped to create and maintain lasting integration competencies and coherent reference architecture across various technologies, aligned to SOA principles.

• Able to significantly improve providing targeted information to increase quality, consistency, and efficiency of IT solutions while driving down cost, complexity, and defects
• Able to reduce labor costs significantly by automating patch management activities and its compliance reporting
• Able to harness numerous products with complementary (and sometimes overlapping) capabilities - Business Process Management and Business Rules Management platforms, Integration Gateways, Service Bus and Messaging technologies, In Memory Data Grids, Data Virtualization and transformation tools, SOA Governance and API Management stacks, Business Activity Monitoring to achieve the kind of scale, responsiveness, and adaptability that the business is looking for
• Built integration solutions and reusable ad