Pacific Blue Cross Implements Progress Sonic ESB To Deliver New Business Services and Improve Customer Service
Wednesday 11 July 2007Mainframe batch processing moves to real-time service-oriented architecture.
Progress Software Corporation, a global supplier of application infrastructure software used to develop, deploy, integrate and manage business applications, announced that Pacific Blue Cross, British Columbia's largest provider of extended health and dental benefits, has implemented the Progress SonicESB ( enterprise service bus ) to deliver new business services, reduce processing times, and offer competitive services to its clients.
As a result of the Sonic ESB implementation, Pacific Blue Cross has adopted a "leave and layer" approach to its service oriented architecture (SOA) strategy: non-critical legacy applications are left alone while a new set of enterprise services is integrated into critical applications which reuse existing business logic. New business applications increasingly leverage the new services exposed through the ESB while existing applications continue to operate until they are eventually replaced.
""We plan to fully transition our IT infrastructure to an SOA over the next several years," said Bruce Hogg, Enterprise Architect for Pacific Blue Cross. "Sonic ESB allows us to leave existing processes in place while layering new business functionality on top, and it allows us to implement a messaging-based distributed infrastructure for migrating to an SOA, step-by-step."
"
Sonic ESB has enabled Pacific Blue Cross to improve the quality and timeliness of information to its user community and become a more member-friendly organization.
For example, in the past, transactions such as enrollments were processed in large batches, which could take up to four days as each process had to wait for the one before to finish. With the messaging-based Sonic ESB, the provider now processes transactions continuously, which allows the company to dramatically improve customer service and enhance its competitiveness.
When new guidelines from the Canadian Payment Association required changes to a mainframe check printing process to allow end-users choice in how payments were received, Pacific Blue Cross used the ESB and its event-based messaging backbone to redirect the mainframe print-stream into independent messages for individual processing in the ESB. This allowed each recipient to receive their payment based on their preferred means of delivery.
""We faced increased competition and compliance regulations; the need for a more dynamic and flexible system was critical. However, many of our legacy applications relied on batch processing. We needed to evolve our systems to support us in a dynamic and competitive marketplace," said Hogg. "We wanted to accelerate our strategic technology plan while continuing to leverage existing infrastructure as much as possible."
"
""Pacific Blue Cross' historical business process is the same as many of the thousands of other large health benefits providers because its original applications weren't designed for the information sharing that customers expect today," said Hub Vandervoort, CTO, Enterprise Infrastructure Division, Progress Software. "What Sonic ESB allows Pacific Blue Cross to do is service-enable those back-end applications and open communication between previously siloed systems and ultimately reduce time-consuming manual efforts."
"
