SOA Success - AAA Carolinas passes competitors by integrating business processes

IBM SOA Customer : SOA in Travel and Transportation

AAA Carolinas passes competitors by integrating business processes. Eliminating paper drives improvements in customer service.

"To scale to meet our rapid growth, AAA Carolinas needs a single, standardized infrastructure to support our insurance and document management applications. IBM WebSphere software forms the basis of a service oriented architecture that will allow us to continue to reuse existing services and integrate new ones for the foreseeable future." - Harry Johns, Manager of Insurance Information Technology, AAA Carolinas

Customer: AAA Carolinas
Deployment Country: United States
IBM Business Partner: RJS Software Systems
Industry: Insurance, Travel & Transportation
SOA Solution: Business Integration, Enabling Business Flexibility, Innovation that matters, Openness, Service Oriented Architecture, Small & Medium Business

SOA Overview
AAA Carolinas has set itself ambitious goals for 2010: To be the top insurance provider of personal lines in the region and exceed $100 million in written premiums. To compete effectively, AAA Carolinas must acquire new customers and retain existing ones by providing better customer service than its rivals. At the same time, staying profitable demands effective cost control, which requires business processes that are optimized for operational efficiency.

Business need: Reduce operating expenses and boost efficiency to maintain profitability and accommodate rapid growth in highly competitive market

Solution: An integrated, lower-cost Web-based solution enables customer service representatives to access information online, in real time

Benefits: Growing 48% a year by offering more responsive customer service; 23% reduction in time to resolution for customer call; insurance applications processed in days, not weeks; $20,000 saved per year in storage costs; ROI in less than two months

SOA Case Study
On Demand Business defined
An enterprise whose business processes—integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers—can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat.

Why Become an On Demand Business?
By eliminating paper documents and integrating key applications, AAA Carolinas lowered costs and offers more responsive service
On Demand Business Benefits
AAA Carolinas realized a full return on its investment in IBM and RJS in less than two months.
AAA Carolinas is growing rapidly—48% a year—by offering more responsive customer service.
AAA Carolinas now processes insurance applications in days, not weeks, increasing agents’ productivity and ability to close sales.
Eliminating the need for additional file cabinets and contract staff to manage archiving of paper documents saves AAA Carolinas $20,000 a year.

“IBM WebSphere Application Server – Express offers us the ease of use and affordability that we need to automate our internal business processes. It also supports J2EE, which gives us a way to build dynamic Web user interfaces with a drag-and-drop development methodology.”

—Harry Johns

“One of the big factors in RJS’s success has been our ability to implement scalable solutions rapidly using the IBM WebSphere software platform.”

—Bill Whalen, Sales and Marketing Executive, RJS Software Systems

“Nothing could be finer than to be in Carolina.” That old show tune is music to the ears of AAA Carolinas, a not-for-profit membership organization operating exclusively in North and South Carolina. Founded in 1922, AAA Carolinas (www.aaacarolinas.com) provides travel and roadside service to more than 1.5 million members. Affiliated with the Automobile Association of America, AAA Carolinas also offers a full range of insurance products, including automotive, homeowners, health and life.

AAA Carolinas has set itself ambitious goals for 2010: To be the top insurance provider of personal lines in the region and exceed $100 million in written premiums. With 2004 written premiums of $20 million and an annual growth rate of 48 percent—four times the national AAA average—the organization is well on its way. A healthy regional economy and AAA Carolinas’ reputation for excellent customer service promise a speedy ride towards its destination.

However, the road has a few twists and turns. Insurance premiums in the Carolinas are regulated by the state governments, limiting the company’s ability to differentiate through pricing. To compete effectively, AAA Carolinas must acquire new customers and retain existing ones by providing better customer service than its rivals. At the same time, staying profitable demands effective cost control, which requires business processes that are optimized for operational efficiency.

Paper documents cause gridlock
Since 1998, AAA Carolinas had relied on a green-screen insurance application from Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) to manage customer information and provide pricing. The organization’s customer service representatives (CSRs) were accomplished in its use and could provide responsive customer service in many cases.

However, some customer-facing activities were suffering, in part due to the organization’s reliance on paper. “Hardcopy insurance applications made the approval rounds sequentially, requiring weeks to process,” relates Harry Johns, manager of insurance information technology. “When an agent requested the status of an application, the customer service representative had to put the call on hold and find the paper copy, which could be located anywhere within the office. As we continued to grow, we realized that our responsiveness to our customers would degrade unless we streamlined and automated the process.”

Automating document management
Johns was wary of any document management solution that would require AAA Carolinas to rip and replace costly IT investments, but that didn’t prove necessary. The organization wanted to continue to use its IBM eServer® iSeries™ system, as Johns attests: “We’ve never found anything that can compete with the iSeries system in our environment. It’s the ideal platform for AAA Carolinas.”

AAA Carolinas evaluated vendors to help them automate their paper processes. Johns chose the WebDocs-iSeries Edition product from RJS Software Systems (RJS), an IBM Business Partner, because of its proven ability to work well on the iSeries platform and extensive feature set. RJS also recommended that Johns use IBM WebSphere Application Server – Express. “One of the big factors in RJS’s success has been our ability to implement scalable solutions rapidly using the IBM WebSphere software platform,” says Bill Whalen, sales and marketing executive for RJS.

Johns took RJS’s advice and has been pleased with the results. “IBM WebSphere Application Server – Express offers us the ease of use and affordability that we need to automate our internal business processes,” Johns explains. “It also supports J2EE [Java 2 Enterprise Edition], which gives us a way to build dynamic Web user interfaces with a drag-and-drop development methodology.”

Enabling CSRs to work from a single screen
At about the same time that Johns was finalizing the decision to move to RJS WebDocs-iSeries Edition, CSC was introducing a new insurance application product called POINT IN. POINT IN features Web-browser access and includes a Java™ technology-based interface using JavaServer Pages (JSP). Johns saw an opportunity to create a single integrated front end that CSRs could use to bring up documents while they were using the POINT IN application.

RJS was excited about integrating the two applications. “We believe in IBM’s business integration approach,” says Whalen. “RJS designed WebDocs – iSeries to integrate easily with other Java technology-based applications in a portal-based environment.” In less than one day, RJS implemented a link between the two applications using Java.

Now, CSRs can perform all of their customer service functions from the POINT IN screen. When they need to access a document, they simply click an icon and the WebDoc application appears. Being able to instantly retrieve a document during a call has greatly speeded response times, as well as providing other capabilities. “CSRs can view, print, fax or e-mail any of our electronic documents, all without leaving the CSC application,” explains Johns. “Our average customer service call is shorter, which reduces our time to resolution by 23 percent.”

Advantages of going paperless
Moving from paper to electronic documents has streamlined the company’s internal processes, leading to operational efficiencies that save time and costs. AAA Carolinas can now process an insurance application in days instead of weeks. This faster turnaround improves the productivity of its agents and allows them to close more sales, especially when they are competing directly with other insurance companies.

In addition, eliminating paper helps AAA Carolinas reduce storage costs. Before implementing WebDocs, the organization had to buy additional filing cabinets regularly, hire temporary help to file the documents and pay an archival firm for offsite storage. “With WebDocs, the overhead expense of archiving paper documents is gone,” says Johns. “That alone saves us $20,000 a year. When we add up the savings, the IBM and RJS solution paid for itself in less than two months.”

Moving ahead with a service oriented architecture
Johns is enthusiastic about how IBM is helping AAA Carolinas meet the company’s challenges: “To scale to meet our rapid growth, AAA Carolinas needs a single, standardized infrastructure to support our insurance and document management applications. IBM WebSphere software forms the basis of a service oriented architecture that will allow us to continue to reuse existing services and integrate new ones for the foreseeable future.”

Key Components
Software
· IBM WebSphere® Application Server – Express
Servers
· IBM eServer iSeries 810
Business Partner
· RJS Software Systems

IBM Business Partners and their customers speak about success with IBM software

IBM SOA Customer : SOA in Travel and Transportation

IBM Business Partners and their customers speak about success with IBM software

Customer: Various
Deployment Country: United Kingdom
Industry: Energy & Utilities, Financial Markets, Industrial Products, Professional Services, Retail, Travel & Transportation, Wholesale Distribution & Services
SOA Solution: Enabling Business Flexibility, SOA Service Oriented Architecture

SOA Overview
IBM® software is at the heart of many successful business operations. Tens of thousands of companies, working closely with IBM Business Partners, are developing innovative ways to do better business everyday by extending, developing and tailoring IBM software products to fit their precise business needs.

Business need: Companies of all kinds are looking to innovate and to make better use of their intellectual capital. The challenge is to find new and better ways to serve customers, while keeping a watchful eye on internal costs and efficiencies.

Solution: IBM Business Partners offer a range of tailored solutions, built on the foundations of software products from IBM.

Benefits: By working with IBM Business Partners to deploy IBM software solutions, companies can reduce costs, boost productivity, better integrate their systems, gain faster insight into

SOA Case Study
IBM® software is at the heart of many successful business operations. Tens of thousands of companies, working closely with IBM Business Partners, are developing innovative ways to do better business everyday by extending, developing and tailoring IBM software products to fit their precise business needs.

IBM DB2® information management software provides access to diverse information easily and efficiently. Underlying the explosion in data collection and analysis, our information management portfolio focuses on managing that content - sharing and exploiting information to manage risk, inform decision-making, and achieve real business value, cost-effectively.

IBM Lotus® products focus on collaboration, teamwork, connectivity and learning, with advanced tools for organising workflows, publishing teamwork and creating communities.

IBM Rational® software is the development platform for advanced application development, designed to meet the need for rapid response to changing business conditions. Rational software enables new applications to be designed, built, tested and deployed, exploiting a high degree of automation, delivering cost-effective business solutions rapidly and reliably.

IBM Tivoli® solutions for growing businesses provides simple, fast, secure IT management assisting with the monitoring, management, protection, diagnosis and recovery of even the most diverse systems landscape. Take advantage of enterprise-class IT management on a midsize business budget with the IBM Tivoli® Express portfolio of storage, security, and availability IT management solutions which help ensure fast time-to-value for customer’s most critical business needs. These solutions are built with practical experience from working with mid-sized customers, leading Business Partners and industry experts.

IBM WebSphere® software helps business achieve flexibility and integration through service oriented architecture (SOA). With the WebSphere toolset, customers can integrate voice, mobile, Web and commercial operations into highly cost-effective business systems serving the needs of shareholders and customers alike.

To find out how customers of all varieties are using IBM software solutions to improve their businesses, please download the PDF at the top of this page.

STM delivers better value for public money with IBM and SAP

IBM SOA Customer : SOA in Travel and Transportation

STM delivers better value for public money with IBM and SAP

“With excellent assistance from IBM Global Business Services, we can easily extend the benefits of SAP software across all parts of the enterprise, and add new functionality that is integrated into the core SAP software systems.” - Steve Boily, Divisional Manager, Architecture and Technology Support

Customer: STM (Société de transport de Montréal)
Deployment Country: Canada
IBM Business Partner: SAP
Industry: Travel & Transportation

SOA Solution: Business Performance Transformation, Enabling Business Flexibility, Enterprise Resource Planning, Infrastructure Simplification, Optimizing IT, Service Oriented Architecture

SOA Overview
Société de transport de Montréal (STM) manages the entire transport infrastructure for Montréal and all the communities of the Island of Montréal, and has a public commitment to “Being the best public transit company in North America.”

Business need: Constant pressure on the public purse means close attention to costs, and managers found that the information needed to understand and control expenditure was not easily available.

Solution: Working with IBM, STM embarked on a major rollout of SAP software, with SAP NetWeaver technology, designed to bring information from every aspect of operations right onto managers’ desktops.

Benefits: Better visibility of costs by activity in bus maintenance, one of the four key activities for STM; the team is able to set KPIs and measure performance, with the potential for significant reductions in long-term cost of ownership for vehicles, equipment and real estate.

SOA Case Study
The Société de transport de Montréal (STM) is responsible for the public transportation systems in the city of Montréal in the Québec province of Canada. The organization manages four metro lines, totaling 66 kilometers of track and serving 65 stations, and 186 bus routes – for a total of more than 360 million passenger journeys each year. STM has more than 7,300 employees and an annual budget of around CAN$870 million.

With a very diverse set of operations, STM found it hard to collect accurate financial data on - for example - bus maintenance costs, personnel costs, rolling stock, real estate and equipment. The information needed was hard to come by, originating from diverse systems that were hard to integrate. STM aimed to control and plan its activities more effectively, and deliver a better service to the citizens of Montréal, and to do this with an IT infrastructure which itself would be lower cost and easier to operate.

Strategic choices for SAP and IBM

In order to enhance business processes and gain a clearer view of enterprise performance, STM opted to expand its ERP software architecture from SAP and to deploy a new transportation management solution called GIRO.Together, these would allow managers to obtain operational data rapidly and cost-effectively, giving them true insight into the business as a whole.Working with IBM, STM has embarked on a major strategic project to deploy portal functionality to extend its SAP software.

The new approach enables the organization to extend the functionality of its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, and to create Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help drive improvements in the efficiency and speed of maintenance processes.

Sylvain LaPointe, Divisional Manager, Business Solutions, comments: “By enabling us to set KPIs and measure performance against them, the IBM solution is already giving managers better information for decision-making.

“Ultimately, we expect to reduce costs and improve transparency across the entire organization – the IBM and SAP solution is a cornerstone of our future information strategy.”

Clearer view

Managers in the bus maintenance division now have better information on which to base their decisions, and in particular much better visibility of costs – whether human or material – by activity. “With SAP software, we are much more proactive and able to plan expenditure more precisely,” comments LaPointe. “There are three key objectives in this area: improve the reliability of the buses, improve their availability through optimal planning of routine maintenance, and reduce the cost per kilometer.

“By achieving the first two objectives, we will need fewer vehicles for the same level of service, so the cost per kilometer will fall. With SAP software running on the resilient IBM System p5 platform, we are making rapid progress towards these goals.”

Says LaPointe, “The strategic vision was to create a Service Oriented Architecture, building integrated business intelligence and other services around core ERP functionality.”

Enterprise-strength systems

STM’s existing ERP software was running on Intel-based servers running Microsoft Windows. Steve Boily, Divisional Manager, Architecture and Technology Support, comments: “To meet our future requirements, we needed to increase the number of concurrent users, and to enable batch and interactive tasks to run simultaneously.

“Our decision to build portals would extend the core SAP software functionality to new users, and extend the working day. We therefore needed a very robust, reliable and high-performance platform – and we chose IBM System p5 servers running AIX 5L.”

IBM provided technical assistance for the migration from Windows to AIX, moving the entire system to two IBM System p5 servers, with Oracle 9.2.0.7 database. In the near future, STM will invest in an additional pSeries for the test, development and quality assurance portions of the SAP software, leaving all the power of the System p5 servers dedicated to the production environment.

STM currently runs its SAP NetWeaver platform on Windows servers, and will migrate it to AIX on the System p5 servers in the coming months, together with other business intelligence components and SAP software interfaces. Consolidating all parts of the SAP architecture onto a single physical platform will aid application integration and prepare the ground for a planned move to mySAP ERP in the second half of 2007.

“The technical support from IBM during the migration to AIX was of very high quality, helping us to accelerate the process and keep risk low,” says Boily.

More intelligent architecture

STM has completed the rollout of the SAP R/3 and portal functionality across the bus maintenance division, and is now at the blueprinting stage for infrastructure maintenance management. With each new element of ERP, the company now deploys a corresponding business intelligence element, so that users can access reporting and KPIs. Says LaPointe, “It’s like a pyramid – ERP functionality at the bottom, SAP Business Information Warehouse in the middle, and the KPIs at the top.”

He adds, “The business benefit is to be able to support all processes, even if they are not standard in the ERP, and integrate the business intelligence function, all wrapped up in a portal that supports change management.”

STM has developed a Web services application in Java for vehicle inspection, delivered directly to maintenance staff through a portal. The application presents the required functionality in an intuitive interface, giving mechanics the information and tools they need without requiring any knowledge of the underlying SAP software. Boily concludes, “With excellent assistance from IBM Global Business Services (BCS), we can easily extend the benefits of SAP software across all parts of the enterprise, and add new functionality that is integrated into the core SAP software systems.

“The reliability and availability of the System p5 servers are more than enough for our requirements, and we are very confident about running the whole SAP software landscape on the System p5 platform in the future.

“The Société de transport de Montréal has set itself an ambitious goal, to become the best public transit company in North America. SAP and IBM solutions are some of the key components helping us to reach our destination."

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Hardware: System x
Operating System: AIX, AIX 5L, Win NT/2000
Services: IBM Global Business Services

IBM Business Partners and their customers speak about success with IBM software

IBM SOA Customer : SOA in Travel and Transportation

IBM Business Partners and their customers speak about success with IBM software

Customer: Various
Deployment Country: United Kingdom
Industry: Chemicals & Petroleum, Consumer Products, Fabrication & Assembly, Government, Healthcare, Industrial Products, Media & Entertainment, Professional Services, Retail, Travel & Transportation
SOA Solution: Enabling Business Flexibility, Service Oriented Architecture

SOA Overview
IBM® software is at the heart of many successful business operations. Tens of thousands of companies, working closely with IBM Business Partners, are developing innovative ways to do better business everyday by extending, developing and tailoring IBM software products to fit their precise business needs.

Business need: Companies of all kinds are looking to innovate and to make better use of their intellectual capital. The challenge is to find new and better ways to serve customers, while keeping a watchful eye on internal costs and efficiencies.

Solution: IBM Business Partners offer a range of tailored solutions, built on the foundations of software products from IBM.

Benefits: By working with IBM Business Partners to deploy IBM software solutions, companies can reduce costs, boost productivity, better integrate their systems, gain faster insight into changing market conditions, and improve customer service in all areas.

SOA Case Study
IBM® software is at the heart of many successful business operations. Tens of thousands of companies, working closely with IBM Business Partners, are developing innovative ways to do better business everyday by extending, developing and tailoring IBM software products to fit their precise business needs.

IBM DB2® information management software provides access to diverse information easily and efficiently. Underlying the explosion in data collection and analysis, our information management portfolio focuses on managing that content - sharing and exploiting information to manage risk, inform decision-making, and achieve real business value, cost-effectively.

IBM Lotus® products focus on collaboration, teamwork, connectivity and learning, with advanced tools for organising workflows, publishing teamwork and creating communities.

IBM Rational® software is the development platform for advanced application development, designed to meet the need for rapid response to changing business conditions. Rational software enables new applications to be designed, built, tested and deployed, exploiting a high degree of automation, delivering cost-effective business solutions rapidly and reliably.

IBM Tivoli® solutions for growing businesses provides simple, fast, secure IT management assisting with the monitoring, management, protection, diagnosis and recovery of even the most diverse systems landscape. Take advantage of enterprise-class IT management on a midsize business budget with the IBM Tivoli® Express portfolio of storage, security, and availability IT management solutions which help ensure fast time-to-value for customer’s most critical business needs. These solutions are built with practical experience from working with mid-sized customers, leading Business Partners and industry experts.

IBM WebSphere® software helps business achieve flexibility and integration through service oriented architecture (SOA). With the WebSphere toolset, customers can integrate voice, mobile, Web and commercial operations into highly cost-effective business systems serving the needs of shareholders and customers alike.

To find out how customers of all varieties are using IBM software solutions to improve their businesses, please download the PDF at the top of this page.

Crowley Maritime plots its course and lowers the boom on costs with Service Oriented Architecture Solution from IBM and Ultramatics

IBM SOA Customer : SOA in Travel and Transportation

Crowley Maritime plots its course and lowers the boom on costs with Service Oriented Architecture Solution from IBM and Ultramatics, Inc., leads to reduced application delivery time and costs, improved efficiency and productivity

"This Service Oriented Architecture SOA solution directly translates to $225,000 in savings for Crowley over our previous practices. Not to mention the soft dollar implications on resource utilization costs and efficiency as those resources can now focus their efforts on other fronts." - Jerry Dresch, director of application services, Crowley Maritime Corporation

Customer: Crowley Maritime
Deployment Country: United States
IBM Business Partner: Ultramatics, Inc.
Industry: Travel & Transportation

SOA Solution: Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer, Business Continuity, Business Integration, Business Performance Transformation, Business Process Management, Business Resiliency, Collaborative Innovation, Customer Relationship Management, Enabling Business Flexibility

SOA Overview
Crowley Maritime Corporation, a global provider of maritime services, needed an innovative solution to streamline costs. It turned to IBM and Business Partner, Ultramatics.

Business need: Crowley needed to reposition its business operations to meet the challenges of its second century of operations -- including reducing operating costs; increasing profits and ROI of existing routes/platforms; and addressing legacy application modernization.

Solution: SOA solution implemented by Ultramatics that includes: o IBM WebSphere Process Server o IBM WebSphere Message Broker for Multiplatform o IBM WebSphere MQ o IBM eServer zSeries 890

Benefits: o Application delivery time and costs reduced by half o $15,000 savings per integration interface; anticipated $225,000 savings over previous practices o Significant improvement in efficiency, productivity, business flexibility o Errrors and omissions reduced

SOA Case Study
A diversified organization employing almost 5,000 people, Crowley Maritime operates globally in a variety of businesses with a mantra of “Small Company Mentality, Big Company Efficiency.” Founded by Tom Crowley in 1892, and run by his son Thomas B. Crowley and grandson Thomas R. Crowley, Jr. since, Crowley Maritime began with a single 18 ft. rowboat servicing ships and sailors in San Francisco Bay.

Over the following century, while maintaining family control of the company, the Crowleys have grown and transformed the business into a major provider of maritime services ranging from tugs and barges to containerships, with operations from Central America and the Caribbean to Alaska’s North Slope. Now nine years into the job of Chairman, President, and CEO, Thomas B. Crowley, Jr. has guided a carefully paced streamlining and repositioning of the company to meet the new challenges of its second century of operations. As Crowley Maritime has grown, it has accumulated business lines and strategies that needed reexamining and improvement in light of changing market conditions that have made ‘return to core competencies’ the new reality for many industries.

Crowley, with headquarters in Oakland, California, and primary logistics operations in Jacksonville, Florida, found the innovations it needed in a Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) solution designed and customized by IBM and Ultramatics, Inc., an IBM Premier Business Partner, headquartered in Tampa, Florida.

Ultramatics used IBM WebSphere® Message Broker for Multiplatform V5, IBM WebSphere MQ V5, IBM eServer™ zSeries® 890 in the solution, which formed the Advanced Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and adapter framework at Crowley.

Key Components of the Crowley Maritime Solution

Software
• IBM WebSphere Message Broker for z/OS V5
• IBM WebSphere MQ V5
• Software Oriented Architecture designed and implemented by Ultramatics, Inc.

One early benefit was a reduction — by at least half — of the usual time and costs incurred in tying new, third-party applications into the Crowley core infrastructure, which included a legacy mainframe-based customer-information system. With a 30-year-old system that was heavily customized, this was no small achievement. Under previous practices, integration projects typically ate up about 300 work hours of people in the Crowley information technology group.

“We had a spider web of point to point connections, with custom-built application interfaces needed at both ends,” said Jerry Dresch, Director of Application Services, at Crowley. Dresch explained: “Prior to the implementation of WebSphere Message Broker and our ESB, Crowley was heavily dependent on point to point integration.”

The ESB is the IBM Advanced Enterprise Service Bus, a foundation for IBM’s Service Oriented Architecture. The IBM Advanced ESB is a robust middleware solution that defines the backbone for corporate integration. It represents a combination of technologies that are responsible for connecting disparate application components without each application component having complete dependency on other application components (inclusive of programming language, platform, operating system, transport, etc.) The ESB becomes the intermediary between all component technologies, and introduces an information pipeline that acts like a kind of information superhighway for incoming and outgoing messages regardless of the applications that connect to it. An application component will plug into the ESB via its published interfaces and necessary adapters. Likewise, applications can be easily added or removed as business demands dictate without concern of complex integration requirements in a rigid environment.

Anticipated $225,000 in savings

“Normally, it could take our team at least 300 hours to develop integration components for our systems and new applications,” Dresch said. “In the event that a change needed to be made, a long and tedious process had to occur. This first step in our SOA Strategy has led to a direct dollar savings of $15,000 per integration interface, which are now implemented as reusable services.”

“As reuse of the SOA platform continues and these numbers hold true,” Dresch continued, “we will see this savings on at least 15 new integration interfaces over the next 24 months. This directly translates to $225,000 in savings for Crowley over our previous practices. Not to mention the soft dollar implications on resource utilization, costs and efficiency as those resources can now focus their efforts on other fronts.”

More important for Crowley Maritime were the strategic benefits, which are part of the ongoing savings and increased operational efficiencies. Early results were seen in the first half of 2006, when a major business initiative at Crowley was launched. This major initiative, implementation of a transportation management system for inter-modal transportation, was purchased and launched in late 2005, effectively “plugging into” the adapter framework and the ESB that Ultramatics and Crowley had already brought into production earlier that year.

This particular inter-modal transportation management system automates the routing of Crowley cargo containers — several hundred per day — to dozens of terminals across North America. The application manages and improves operational efficiency of the intermodal portion of Crowley Maritime’s ocean shipping business. As the first true test of the ability of the Crowley Service Oriented Architecture to easily integrate with a substantial package, the adapter framework and Enterprise Service Bus performed above expectations and with unprecedented flexibility.

“Right away in Pennsauken (New Jersey),” said Ed Ramsey, manager of the Crowley Integration Team, “we were seeing efficiencies we had never seen before. The routes chosen were, on average, better, cheaper and faster,” he continued. “So we’re raising the quality of services we can provide. We’re increasing customer satisfaction. And we’re seeing fewer empty containers
on the back-haul trips.”

SOA Benefits

• $15,000 saving per integration interface; anticipated $225,000 savings over previous practices
• Application delivery time and costs were immediately cut in half
• Enterprise specific standards and effective SOA governance led to significant operational efficiencies and productivity improvements
• Errors and omissions reduced
• Creation and exposure of services called for by applications within SOA leveraged for every new application rollout
• Technology simplification, application modernization as a result of reusing legacy assets rather than replacement

Legacy Modernization as a direct benefit of Service Oriented Architecture

The Crowley/Ultramatics’ team has built at least 20 major interfaces for the Enterprise Service Bus by way of the adapter framework – including interfaces to equipment control systems, the legacy Accounts Receivable system, Customer/Vendor information system, and others. One major component of the success of these projects though was utilizing a proven methodology of ‘service enablement’ for several legacy systems/applications that continue to serve Crowley very well.

“Having delivered service oriented architecture SOA to several customers, Ultramatics worked closely with Crowley to describe and document SOA & Integration Best Practices as related to addressing items like legacy modernization,” said Sean Jensen, Sales and Marketing Manager for Ultramatics.

Ultramatics helped Crowley add years of life to several back end legacy systems/applications by creating “service enabled” adapters to older, heavily customized systems/applications. In effect, as new packages like the transportation management system (or any other new package) were implemented, they could be seamlessly integrated and thus communicate with every Crowley back end system. The methodical approach leads to significant “reuse” as portions of those same interfaces are leveraged for new packages.

“One of our biggest successes from my perspective,” Ed Ramsey adds, “is that our financial leaders love how easily we were able to leverage the interfaces we created for the legacy Accounts Receivable system. By way of service enablement, two additional operational systems can invoke the services on the legacy AR system as needed. Bringing the total to three financial systems using and reusing the same interface, these financial leaders were more easily able to view the core data that was so important to them. Ultramatics had alluded to benefits like this as a byproduct of the Service Oriented Architecture during our roadmap sessions, but the quick visibility of these benefits to the business was impressive.”

The ability to create services for legacy applications has subsequently added life to legacy applications that were not ready for replacement (due to years of heavy customization and unique abilities of that existing package). “The integration framework took care of it all.”

These benefits are expected to multiply during 2006 and 2007 as other key corporate processes — including financial systems, human resources, and business-to-business interactions — were brought into the integration framework.

‘Enterprise view’ wanted

The challenges that led Crowley to Ultramatics had been mounting for several years. Facing the reality that the Crowley business would be making several acquisitions of other businesses as well as establishing new partner relationships to fill gaps in services and operations (partnership with trucking companies, for example), Crowley sought expert guidance from Ultramatics in the area of “Integration Best Practices.”

The question of how to support each future integration requirement was growing urgent since Crowley already had three smaller lines of business whose information systems had not yet been integrated into the core business operations. This complexity was even seen in accounts receivable, since many customers were buying services of different kinds from two or more of the Crowley business units. Each unit had developed its own style of tracking, pricing and servicing a specific customer — some literally paper- and pencil-based.

“Crowley felt that, in some cases, they were leaving money on the table and could improve profitability with some segments,” said Saru Seshadri, President and Chief Executive Officer, at Ultramatics.

Crowley management wanted, first of all, a single enterprise view of its business processes and revenue flows. Managers wanted to view metrics for transaction monitoring (like a business dashboard) as well as wanting operating lines to interact in real time with a unified customer-information database. Equally important, they wanted any new business application that the company might want to adopt to be easily integrated into the core infrastructure.

Dresch said each point-to-point link between a new application and the core infrastructure “had to be built laboriously in-house. Reliability and manageability were becoming really difficult. Data transfers with some of the third-party applications were increasingly prone to failure. We never knew what we were getting into when the business decided it wanted to install a new application. We did know we couldn’t keep living like that.”

That was the situation when, in early 2004, Crowley engaged the consultants at Ultramatics for advice. Ultramatics specializes in business-process integration and service-oriented architectures. The Ultramatics team spent most of the rest of 2004 working side-by-side with Crowley management and the in-house technology group, studying the company’s history and what it was trying to do strategically going forward. “They became a trusted advisor to our business,” said Dresch.

Positioning itself as a “go-to” partner in the transportation industry, Ultramatics approached Crowley from the position of “Best Practices” in their vertical market. Having delivered at other transportation industry customers, Ultramatics spent the education time needed for Crowley to understand the strategic importance of implementing a “sustainable” and robust solution, one that would answer their current pains around point to point integration, but also be positioned for future, unexpected desires from the Crowley business.

The upshot was the implementation, starting in 2005 and continuing into 2006, of the Crowley SOA solution. IBM middleware was the foundation. Saru Seshadri, President of Ultramatics adds, “Our ‘Best Practices’ message is one of Ultramatics’ strongest competitive advantages. Our core competencies are centered on the IBM WebSphere and Rational technologies because they are the most robust, most comprehensive and most reliable - but the ability to show new prospects that your firm can help them bypass some of the common pitfalls/mistakes that other have made is one of the strongest messages we can bring to the table.” Seshadri adds, “we quaintly call this our “battle scars” when talking with new customers about SOA strategies and the need for an iterative approach to SOA Service Oriented Architecture. It simply cannot be a ‘Big Bang’ approach, or you lose some of the governance and strategic value that service oriented architecture SOA delivers to an enterprise.”

“Our ‘Best Practices’ message is one of Ultramatics’ strongest competitive advantages. Our core competencies are centered on theIBM WebSphere and Rational technologies because they are the most robust, most comprehensive and most reliable…but the ability to show new prospects that your firm can help them bypass some of the common pitfalls/mistakes that other have made is one of the strongest messages we can bring to the table.”

Saru Seshadri, President & CEO, Ultramatics, Inc.

Regarding an iterative approach to Service Oriented Architecture:

“It simply cannot be a ‘Big Bang’ approach, or you lose some of the governance and strategic value that SOA delivers to an enterprise.”

Saru Seshadri, President & CEO, Ultramatics, Inc.

How service oriented architecture SOA works

Sean Jensen, sales and marketing manager, for Ultramatics, explained that the magic of SOA is that it supports the reusability of components and provides easy access to those components when needed – on demand.” Jensen said the combination of IBM WebSphere MQ and the Message Broker were the “heart” of the SOA at Crowley. “SOA serves as the central medium, doing the required translations and conversions, and tracking down reusable components wherever they may reside, instantly, automatically, and supplying them to wherever they may be needed,” Jensen said. “That eliminated all the massive tweaking that had to be done at the application level previously.”

“It makes for a very flexible and strategic infrastructure that serves as the linchpin for everything else that they do,” Jensen continued. “It’s a sustainable architecture — not a solution to be implemented today for a benefit today. It allows Crowley Maritime to build a really strategic core infrastructure — one they can keep building on.”

“It’s a sustainable architecture — not a solution to be implemented today for a benefit today. It allows this customer to build a really strategic core infrastructure — one they can keep building on.” Sean Jensen, Sales & Marketing Manager, Ultramatics, Inc.

Ultramatics, IBM PartnerWorld®, and SOA Specialty

When Ultramatics opened its doors in 2001, “we found immediate, mutual benefits in working with IBM,” said Seshadri. Ultramatics became an IBM Premier Business Partner in 2003. “And now we’re in many IBM programs. Recognized and certified as an IBM Business Partner as “SOA Specialty” certified, Ultramatics participates in IBM programs such as vertical-industry workshops
and co-marketing projects that are tightly integrated to the Ultramatics business vision and increasing the core competencies.

With SOA Solution Galleries in Tampa, Florida, and Chennai, India, Ultramatics delivers vertical domain solutions in the areas of Healthcare, Transportation, Banking, and Telecom. In 2006, Ultramatics was recognized by IBM with the “Beacon Award” nomination for excellence in solution delivery.

Ultramatics participates in IBM PartnerWorld Industry Networks, which offers a rich set of incremental industry-tailored resources to all PartnerWorld members who want to build their vertical market capabilities and attract potential customers in the markets they serve worldwide. Whether a company focuses on one or more industries — or serves small, medium or large companies — IBM has the technology and resources to help members more effectively meet their clients’ needs.

Ultramatics is an “optimized” member of the travel and transportation industry, which means it has developed further specialization by optimizing its applications with IBM on demand technologies, achieving success with its own on demand solutions and meeting other criteria.

Other networks are automotive, banking, education and learning, electronics, energy and utilities, fabrication and assembly, financial markets, healthcare and life sciences, insurance, media and entertainment, retail, telecommunications and wholesale.

Seshadri said Ultramatics used the network benefits “various ways over the past year to solidify our position at Crowley. The program helped us maintain a strategic perspective on Crowley requirements from a vertical industry perspective.” The vertical industry perspective is important to Ultramatics. It focuses on the vertical markets of transportation, healthcare, telecommunications and banking. Ultramatics’ offerings are branded as UltraStart Business Solutions and include IBM software, integration services and skill transfer.

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Hardware: System z
Software: WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere MQ, WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker for Multiplatforms
Operating System: z/OS and OS/390

Malaysia Airports Technologies : Integrating airport operations with IBM’s SOA platform

Malaysia Airports Technologies : Integrating airport operations with IBM’s SOA platform

IBM SOA Customer : SOA in Travel and Transportation

"MAT can now distribute real-time information from disparate sources, communicating accurate and timely resource, planning, and operations information to essential departments." - YBhg Dato’ Azmi Murad, Senior General Manager

Customer: Malaysia Airports Technologies
Deployment Country: Malaysia
Industry: Travel & Transportation
Solution: SOA Service Oriented Architecture

SOA Overview

Airport operations typically extend across multiple service providers, comprising processes, people and information segregated by location, role and function. Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) opened in 1997 using a suite of disparate solutions linked together by middleware. As passenger numbers, flight frequencies and carrier types continued to grow, these older technologies were no longer sustainable.

Business need: Malaysia Airports Technologies (MAT) needed a flexible mechanism for incrementally migrating to new applications and rolling out solutions to multiple airports while continuing to operate with the existing infrastructure technology and applications.

Solution: IBM offered an SOA-based solution that delivered a universal mechanism to interconnect all applications required to support MAT's worldwide airport operations without compromising security, reliability, or scalability. IBM’s solution also helped MAT to distribute real-time information from disparate information sources and provided a powerful new means of unifying employees across the organization. IBM GBS developed a roadmap for MAT to migrate to this new flexible service-oriented approach.

Benefits: MAT can now distribute real-time information from disparate sources, providing a powerful new means of unifying employees across the entire organization. The solution also enables MAT to replace individual components without compromising the integrity of airport operations.

SOA Case Study

MAT is the subsidiary of Malaysia Airports responsible for the operation and maintenance of all information technology systems and infrastructure at KLIA and for undertaking ICT (information and communications technology) business ventures. Among the services it offers include airport system solutions, system integration, networking, broadband network service, facility management and monitoring.

Business Need
MAT knew that establishing an integrated, end-to-end on demand airport technology environment would help improve the information flow across internal business units. Instead of operating multiple systems that were not designed to work in synch, an integrated environment would enable more efficient and cost-effective processes, enrich collaboration, and create a less complex infrastructure from which to manage relationships with employees, partners, suppliers, agents and customers.

However, replacing all the separate systems with a single system was both cost-prohibitive and logistically infeasible. Malaysia Airports Technologies needed a solution that would allow its existing applications to work together without having to replace its existing technology investment. It needed to ensure that as applications came to the end of their life they could be replaced incrementally without compromising the integrity of the airport operations. MAT needed a flexible mechanism for integrating the operations technology at KLIA that would support ongoing change and growth.

SOA Solution
IBM Global Business Services implemented IBM’s Airport Integration Solution, which provides the common interface between processes, people and information, helping to convert complex airport operational functions into services that can be easily accessed without the need for significant changes in the underlying infrastructure. The solution brings applications from leading specialist providers in airport operations and management information systems into a cohesive and complete solution optimized for airport operations.

Utilizing IBM’s SOA framework and integration solution enables MAT to leverage existing investments and to create a common communications network and operational database. IBM WebSphere, provides the platform that unifies disparate applications across the entire organization.

SOA Benefits
- The solution creates, maintains, and stores resource, planning, and operations data in a secure repository, readily available for reporting, auditing, and analysis purposes.
- Integrates and coordinates resource, planning, and operations information with best of breed front-end systems such as Flight Information Display Systems (FIDS), check-in counter displays and Common Use Terminal Equipment (CUTE), and back-office systems such as ERP and finance systems.
- It communicates accurate and timely resource, planning, and operations information to essential departments: planning, operations, passenger-service, security, ramp workers and service partners.
- MAT can now distribute real-time information from disparate sources, providing a powerful new means of unifying employees across the entire organization.
- The solution provides MAT with a flexible platform to extend and enhance business functionality to the airport's changing needs and enables MAT to replace individual components without compromising the integrity of the airport operations.

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Software: WebSphere Business Integration
Services: GBS Enterprise Integration, IBM Global Business Services, IBM Software Service for WebSphere

Xerox enhances productivity with IBM enterprise service bus solution and SOA

Xerox enhances productivity with IBM enterprise service bus solution and SOA.

IBM SOA Customer in Electronics:

"With IBM’s help we can move forward with a service oriented architecture that helps us respond to today’s challenges and gives us a flexible architecture to respond to future challenges." - Ram Sunkara, Manager, Integration Competency Center, Xerox

Customer: Xerox
Deployment Country: United States
IBM Business Partner: Software Spectrum
Industry: Electronics

IBM SOA Solution: Business Integration, Customer Relationship Management, Enabling Business Flexibility, Enterprise Resource Planning, Openness, Service Oriented Architecture, Supply Chain Management, e-business infrastructure

Overview
Based in Stamford, Connecticut, Xerox (www.xerox.com) has 58,100 employees worldwide who are committed to helping people find better ways to work. While copying has been good to Xerox, the widespread duplication of efforts to custom code new business applications for its many product divisions became a bottleneck that hampered productivity.

Business need: Custom coding for new and updated business applications slowed production and raised costs

Solution: Enterprise service bus (ESB) enabling the integration of back-end databases with decoupled front ends without custom coding

Benefits: 100% payback of investment in 24 months; savings of $720,000 per year in deployment costs; development and implementation of new applications in 25% of the time it took previously

Why IBM?
Xerox wanted a vendor that would support its software with future product development, and IBM showed the SOA leadership, stability and commitment to the market that Xerox required

“Not only did IBM meet our requirements for scalability, availability and performance, it differentiated itself from the competition with its ability to follow through with research and development to continuously enhance its portfolio of offerings.”

–Ram Sunkara

“Wherever we have a need for a middleware solution to enable us to develop more flexibility or leverage our existing assets, all we have to do is ask IBM. ”
–Ram Sunkara

Best known throughout the world for replacing the blurry, messy mimeograph with the crisp, clean and sharp photocopy, Xerox Corporation (Xerox) revolutionized office work as its name became synonymous with its flagship product, the copy machine. Xerox research is also credited with many innovations that define personal computing today, including Ethernet, the graphical user interface and the mouse. Based in Stamford, Connecticut, Xerox (www.xerox.com) has 58,100 employees worldwide who are committed to helping people find better ways to work.

While copying has been good to Xerox, the widespread duplication of efforts to custom code new business applications for its many product divisions became a bottleneck that hampered productivity. The multiple corporate divisions that produce Xerox’s wide range of products and services require a steady flow of new business applications to automate manual processes, serve customers better and achieve ever more demanding marketing goals. But developing each new application from scratch was a waste of effort, especially since many applications shared common back-end databases and enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

To centralize these programming efforts and bring costs under control by using more efficient methods of application development and integration, Xerox created its Integration Competency Center. This group, dedicated to integrating Xerox’s business applications with back-end systems, set to work to build an information technology (IT) architecture that would enable them to reuse coding assets and leverage a common infrastructure for integrating a large number of applications.

ESB delivers an infrastructure for flexible connectivity
After several years of integrating applications using CORBA code, the group found that they were writing increasing amounts of custom code, sending costs up and slowing deployment cycles. Xerox began to evaluate middleware for a new enterprise service bus (ESB) architecture—a pattern of middleware that unifies and connects services, applications and resources within a business. The ESB pattern enables the connection of software running in parallel on different platforms and using disparate programming languages and skills, allowing Xerox to more quickly and easily introduce new applications and updates to their users.

To provide the integration business logic for its ESB framework, Xerox evaluated middleware from IBM, BEA Systems and webMethods. In the end, they chose a solution providing universal connectivity—an ESB with full failover capabilities using the message-oriented, event-driven and Web services capabilities of WebSphere software. IBM WebSphere Message Broker (formerly known as IBM WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker), IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment and IBM WebSphere MQ were the foundation for an advanced ESB solution to deploy its growing portfolio of business applications in the most efficient way possible. IBM Business Partner Software Spectrum provided the software solution in a timely manner to help Xerox meet its target project deadline.

“IBM was the most credible presence in the market in terms of its ability to develop middleware products and support them with related products and services,” says Ram Sunkara, manager, Integration Competency Center, Xerox. “Not only did IBM meet our requirements for scalability, availability and performance, it differentiated itself from the competition with its ability to follow through with research and development to continuously enhance its portfolio of offerings.”

With its new ESB solution based on WebSphere software, Xerox estimates it is saving $720,000 annually in the cost of making changes to its applications, which formerly required custom coding to reintegrate with back-ends systems. In addition, application changes take 25 percent of the time they took previously. “We achieved payback in 24 months,” says Sunkara. “As for our conviction that IBM would support its software with future product development, IBM repaid that with an entire integration infrastructure for applications and data that includes new products we are considering for adoption.”

Flexible, available infrastructure powers 50 solutions
Among the 50 applications that run on the new WebSphere infrastructure are Web services for looking up service providers for Xerox’s customer support teams, performing credit authorizations, managing customer problem calls, fulfilling parts orders and capturing user profiles for printers. Many of these applications require 24x7 availability, and the failover capability of WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment ensures that users will have service when they need it. In addition, WebSphere Application Server plays a part in Xerox’s disaster recovery plan. Also working to maximize uptime is WebSphere MQ, which provides assured delivery of more than two million messages monthly, an essential part of the integration solution that connects Xerox’s back-end databases and other business systems to application front ends.

The open standards-based integration solution supports a service oriented architecture (SOA) that is compatible with multiple methods of communicating with back-end systems, including messaging with WebSphere MQ and WebSphere Message Broker. WebSphere Message Broker transforms and enriches information on the fly to conform to different message structures and formats on back ends. A J2EE and Web services application server with advanced deployment services, WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment supports Enterprise JavaBeans for creating applications that make fast work of the business logic. Xerox also uses IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition to build modular applications that are designed to adapt quickly to changes.

Developing standards for SOA
With its ESB integration solution and SOA, Xerox is moving to standardize application integration throughout its global organization. This entails creating a set of Web services for leveraging some existing mainframe information and making it accessible via the Web. “Right now we’re working on tying in our European operations and establishing governance practices for continuous process improvement,” says Sunkara. “We’re also looking at using IBM WebSphere Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) to extend our host applications to the Web—giving our green screen applications a modern and up-to-date look. Along the way, we’ll be looking at IBM WebSphere Data Integration Suite to perform extract, transform and load operations within some of our data management environments. Wherever we have a need for a middleware solution to enable us to develop more flexibility or leverage our existing assets, all we have to do is ask IBM. With IBM’s help we can move forward with a service oriented architecture that helps us respond to today’s challenges and gives us a flexible architecture to respond to future challenges.”

Key Components

Software

IBM WebSphere® Message Broker (formerly known as IBM WebSphere Business Integration Message Broker)
IBM WebSphere MQ
IBM WebSphere Application Server Network Deployment
IBM WebSphere Studio Application Developer Integration Edition

Business Partner : Software Spectrum

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Software: Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Message Broker for Multiplatforms, WebSphere MQ

University of Pittsburgh Medical Center partners with IBM to make tomorrow's patient care a reality

IBM SOA at University of Pittsburgh Medical Center partners with IBM to make tomorrow's patient care a reality. IBM SOA customer - University of Pittsburgh - SOA in Healthcare industry.

“We are combining IBM’s unparalleled infrastructure knowledge with our medical knowledge. At the end of our eight-year transformation project, we expect to see cost savings of 15 to 20 percent.” - – Dan Drawbaugh, CIO, UPMC

IBM SOA Customer
Customer: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC)
Deployment Country: United States
Industry: Healthcare
Solution: Business-to-Business, Business-to-Consumer, Business Integration, Business Intelligence, Enabling Business Flexibility, Information Integration, Infrastructure Simplification, Innovation that matters, IT/infrastructure, Knowledge Management

Overview
UPMC, a leading IT innovator, sought to become a truly integrated, self-regulating healthcare system, utilizing evidence-based medicine to produce superb clinical outcomes and lower costs.

Business need: UPMC knew it needed an innovative relationship combined with world class technology to achieve its goals. It saw IBM’s pioneering vision and technology as a way to simplify its IT systems, facilitate the sharing of data and improve its flexibility.

Solution: In a landmark strategic partnership valued at $402 million over 8 years, UPMC’s systems will be transformed into an On Demand Business environment using IBM products and services. On this foundation, IBM and UPMC will work together to bring new healthcare solutions to market.

Benefits: - Expected IT cost savings of up to 20% - Major increase in efficiency through server consolidation and virtualization

Case Study

“We are combining IBM’s unparalleled infrastructure knowledge with our medical knowledge. At the end of our eight-year transformation project, we expect to see cost savings of 15 to 20 percent.”
– Dan Drawbaugh, CIO, UPMC

UPMC is the premier health system in western Pennsylvania and one of the most renowned academic medical centers in the United States. Its 40,000 employees and 4,000 doctors are spread across a network of 19 hospitals and 400 smaller sites throughout western Pennsylvania.
>> On Demand Business defined
“An enterprise whose business processes—integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers and customers—can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity or external threat.”

Challenge
UPMC, a leading IT innovator, sought to become a truly integrated, self-regulating healthcare system, utilizing evidence-based medicine to produce superb clinical outcomes and lower costs.

Why Become an On Demand Business?
UPMC knew it needed an innovative relationship combined with world class technology to achieve its goals. It saw IBM’s pioneering vision and technology as a way to simplify its IT systems, facilitate the sharing of data and improve its flexibility.

Solution
In a landmark strategic partnership valued at $402 million over 8 years, UPMC’s systems will be transformed into an On Demand Business environment using IBM products and services. On this foundation, IBM and UPMC will work together to bring new healthcare solutions to market.

Key Benefits
- Expected IT cost savings of up to 20%
- Major increase in efficiency through server consolidation and virtualization

This is a story of how two important players in the healthcare space—one a leading integrated health system, the other a leading provider of IT solutions—discovered they had a shared vision of tomorrow’s healthcare delivery model, and how their common goals became the foundation of a new kind of relationship. It’s the story of how these players, IBM and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), saw the opportunity to combine and complement each other’s strengths to forge a new generation of healthcare solutions. Perhaps most unique, it’s an example of how they went outside the boundaries of a customer-vendor relationship and selected each other as partners, an arrangement likely to serve as a template for the healthcare business in the coming years. Here’s how it happened.

From its roots as a major academic medical center, UPMC (www.upmc.com) has evolved into Pennsylvania’s largest integrated health care delivery system—with revenues of $5.8 billion—and one of the nation’s most influential healthcare institutions. In addition to operating the nation’s largest transplant program and an array of highly specialized clinical services that draw patients from across the nation and around the world, UPMC acts as the major source of routine healthcare services for residents of western Pennsylvania. UPMC is also closely affilated with the University of Pittsburgh, one of the top recipients of National Institutes of Health research funding. As the term “integrated delivery network” implies, UPMC’s mission is to provide outstanding patient care and to shape tomorrow's health system through clinical innovation, biomedical and health services research and education. With UPMC’s rapid growth and large investments in advanced IT initiatives, being integrated hasn’t always been easy. Each new hospital added to the network added to the complexity of the organization; each new system added to the complexity of its IT infrastructure. In combination, these factors made it that much harder for UPMC to integrate its resources for the benefit of its patients. In the big picture, this created a tremendous challenge—finding an effective way to leverage integrated information across its large and diverse system. UPMC’s early efforts to address this challenge led to its first contacts with IBM.

On Demand Business Benefits
Project up to a 20% reduction in overall IT costs
Simplified infrastructure, facilitating integration of data from across the UPMC enterprise
Increased cost predictability through IBM Open Infrastructure Offering financing model
Increased flexibility to grow systems and add new technologies by virtue of open systems support
Single point of access for all clinical applications, improving caregiver efficiency and quality of care
Improved ability to develop, commercialize and profit from clinical innovations

Every relationship has a starting point, and for UPMC and IBM it was a specific engagement focused on improving the performance of its Cerner Millennium electronic health record system. One of the many solutions that place UPMC among the healthcare industry’s leading innovators, the Cerner system performed adequately but fell short of UPMC’s high expectations due to response time and availability problems. IBM proposed that it could address it by consolidating and simplifying the infrastructure on which it ran. UPMC engaged IBM to redeploy the new Cerner system, which had been running on HP servers, on the IBM eServer™ pSeries® platform. The improvement was immediate and dramatic, with response time going from five seconds to “blink speed” and downtime falling precipitously. But more important, the engagement gave UPMC concrete proof of how IBM’s vision and expertise could be applied to its broader vision—the integration of all of its healthcare information resources. That’s where the real story begins.

Building a foundation for the future
Having established a new level of credibility with UPMC, IBM sought to provide it with a fuller picture of its own healthcare vision and the depth and breadth of resources it had to back it up. UPMC—interested in hearing more about IBM’s roadmap for integration, transformation and simplification—provided a willing audience. In extensive meetings involving a cross section of top UPMC decision-makers, an equally broad-based IBM team presented its vision of how On Demand Business supports the emerging requirements for world-class healthcare delivery. Hearing IBM articulate its strategy for On Demand Business, UPMC was struck by how closely it resonated with its own needs and vision— this realization marked the foundation of the partnership between IBM and UPMC.

UPMC looked at the dynamism of the healthcare industry and saw a host of challenges and opportunities that mandated the need for a strategic partner. The challenge was to establish, support and pay for an infrastructure that is flexible, robust and secure enough to support its healthcare vision. The opportunity for UPMC was to bring a stream of innovative new solutions to the market without diluting its focus. UPMC saw IBM—with its common vision, unmatched strengths in research and development and solid track record in the Healthcare and Life Sciences—as being singularly well-equipped to meet them. IBM saw UPMC as the perfect center of evidence for IT solutions for healthcare. Both companies realized that the close-knit, long-term nature of the mission, and the shared vision and high reward stakes, called for a new kind of customer-vendor relationship that would serve as a model for healthcare in the 21st century.

Key Components

Software IBM WebSphere® Application Server
IBM WebSphere Business Integration
IBM Tivoli® product suite

Hardware IBM eServer xSeries®
IBM eServer pSeries
IBM eServer zSeries®
IBM eServer BladeCenter®
IBM TotalStorage®
Lenovo PCs

Solution IBM Component Infrastructure Roadmap

Services IBM Global Services - Integrated Technology Services
IBM Business Consulting Services
IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences
IBM Research
IBM STG Services
IBM SWG Services

A new relationship model, a new era
The result was an 8-year, $352 million agreement under which IBM Global Services – Integrated Technology Services and IBM Business Consulting Services—will work with UPMC to transform its IT infrastructure through consolidation and standardization across the entire enterprise. Under the deal, UPMC’s 931 servers will be reduced to 319 (IBM eServer xSeries, pSeries, zSeries and BladeCenter servers), nine operating systems reduced to four, and 40 storage databases reduced to just two (running on IBM TotalStorage Enterprise Storage Servers). To manage the infrastructure centrally and efficiently, the solution will employ a common toolset based on IBM Tivoli products. Moreover, its reliance on standard technology enables a high degree of virtualization within the infrastructure, further driving efficiency and leading to overall IT cost savings of up to 20 percent. IBM’s integration efforts were guided by its Component Infrastructure Roadmap, a defined and agreed-upon blueprint for integrating the appropriate capabilities into a client’s IT environment.

What makes the deal truly groundbreaking is its second major component: a $50 million strategic partnership—funded equally by UPMC and IBM—aimed at supporting the co-development and commercialization of new healthcare solutions. The partnership, whose value could potentially reach $200 million, enables UPMC to turn its full attention to its strong suit—clinical and research innovation—while leveraging IBM’s proven ability to bring open solutions to market. Moreover, the new revenue stream created by the venture provides UPMC with a solid return on its investment in innovations as well as a means of sustaining and expanding them.

5 Reasons Why UPMC Partnered with IBM
On Demand Business for people, process and technology
IBM’s “unmatched” R&D capability
IBM’s strength in Healthcare and Life Sciences
Availability of Open Infrastructure Offering pricing model
Breadth, depth and cohesiveness of IBM team supporting the partnership

“A question that may be asked is, ‘How did UPMC select IBM?’ In reality, however, it was IBM and UPMC selecting each other.” -- Dan Drawbaugh, CIO, UPMC

In the final analysis, though, the relationship’s true value has to be measured by its support of UPMC’s efforts to transform the way it cares for the patient. Here are some fundamental examples of how it will. UPMC’s new infrastructure will enable the seamless and secure sharing of patient data across applications and multiple locations, thus providing caregivers with instant access to the information they need to deliver the best possible patient care. At the core, infrastructure simplification—characterized by the flexibility, adherence to standards and data model consistency of IBM’s service-oriented architecture approach—is what makes it possible. These same infrastructure properties will enable UPMC to add new capabilities rapidly and seamlessly. And as UPMC develops new solutions for the broader market, its open infrastructure, combined with IBM’s go-to-market expertise, will speed their fruition.

While it’s easy to view technology as the driver of UPMC’s choice to partner with IBM, the deal in fact rests on several of IBM’s unique strengths, such as its ability to pull together resources from across the company into “one IBM” and present it to UPMC as a single offer. Indeed, UPMC’s access to the flexible funding of IBM’s Open Infrastructure Offering—a key aspect of IBM’s On Demand Business framework—enabled it to avoid large upfront expenditures, while guaranteeing access to all the IBM resources it needs to realize its vision. As IBM Executive Sponsor Dan Pelino sees it, IBM is eager to bring its mix of vision, expertise and technology to its partnership with UPMC to develop new and better ways to improve healthcare. “As partners, UPMC and IBM can make the difference in healthcare, nationally and globally. This is about two world class organizations coming together to deliver on a single vision—world class healthcare for each and every one of us.”

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Hardware: BladeCenter, System p, System x, System z
Software: WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Business Integration Server
Services: IBM Global Business Services, IBM Integrated Technology Services, IBM Software Service for WebSphere

IBM SOA - netASPx delivers new value to customers with IBM middleware

netASPx delivers new value to customers with IBM middleware. IBM SOA customer - netASPX - SOA in Healthcare industry

"By incorporating IBM technology, netASPx is able to deliver a wide range of benefits to its customers. We’re able to provide and manage ERP applications at a scale and service level that are unprecedented in the market." - Chance Veasey, Vice President of Operations, netASPx

IBM SOA Customer
Customer: netASPx
Deployment Country: United States
Industry: Banking, Computer Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Retail
Solution: Enabling Business Flexibility, Enterprise Resource Planning, SOA Service Oriented Architecture, Small & Medium Business

Overview
netASPx is an innovator in the delivery of “software as a service.” The company provides Managed Applications Services (MAS) for enterprise resource planning and workforce management solutions. netASPx automates these functions for customers at lower cost, higher service levels and with less risk than would result if customers maintained an in-house team.

Business need: Respond to customers’ demands for scalability, performance and high availability, with the cost-effectiveness of a hosted solution

IBM SOA Solution: Incorporation of IBM middleware, security and server technology into a hosted ERP application

Benefits: netASPx can better serve customers who could not afford a clustered environment; ability for customers to focus on high-value work without needing to maintain infrastructure; improved performance will enable customers to migrate to Web solution and save costs for themselves and for netASPx

Case Study
“By implementing load balancing with WebSphere Application Server, we can offer our customers application clusters. This provides them not only with additional reliability but increased performance. So we can have a failure on one application server node and it doesn’t negatively affect users of the system.”

–Chance Veasey

netASPx is an innovator in the delivery of “software as a service.” The company provides Managed Applications Services (MAS) for enterprise resource planning and workforce management solutions. netASPx automates these functions for customers at lower cost, higher service levels and with less risk than would result if customers maintained an in-house team.

Specifically, the netASPx data center in Minneapolis delivers a hosted solution of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems that include Financials, Human Resources, Procurement, Healthcare Supply Chain Management, and software for Service Process Optimization and Retailers. The solution resides on a high-availability platform for approximately 70 customers, who pay on a monthly per-user basis.

Recently netASPx’s ERP vendor announced that it was expanding its existing partnership with IBM. With the availability of its new release, not only will this ERP vendor develop on IBM middleware and hardware technologies, it will also encapsulate IBM middleware and security software into its products.

IBM WebSphere® Application Server Network Deployment lies at the center of the new offering. This enables netASPx to provide its customers higher availability and scalability, with a no-single-point-of-failure architecture. By running the software on WebSphere Application Server clusters, ASPs like netASPx enable customers who might not have been able to afford this high-availability architecture by themselves to take advantage of a scalable, available and high-performance infrastructure. In addition, netASPx’s strategy of software as a service supports the IBM approach to service oriented architecture (SOA), which automates repeatable business processes with software services that create efficiencies while connecting people, processes and information.

Along with WebSphere Application Server, the new release also uses IBM Tivoli® Directory Server to help clients meet the demands of regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. In addition, the new release will be supported across all IBM server platforms, including IBM System i™ and i5™, System p™ and p5™, System z™, and System x™. netASPx has chosen to run the application on the System p5 550, clustering the solution with the IBM General Parallel File System.

“By incorporating IBM technology, netASPx is able to deliver a wide range of benefits to its customers,” says Chance Veasey, vice president of operations of netASPx. “We’re able to provide and manage ERP applications at a scale and service level that are unprecedented in the market.

“Thanks to IBM technology, and our infrastructure and support, our customers can focus on their core business. Their technologists can work and manage the client or patient care systems that are essential to what they do. Behind the scenes, supporting them, netASPx takes on the responsibility of patching a financial or HR payroll system, worrying about the performance of Web servers and working to get more reliability and capacity from the infrastructure.”

Managing delivery and quality of service
Healthcare represents close to 20 percent of netASPx’s customer base. Retail is the second largest category, representing up to 18 percent of the company’s installed base, and the rest consists of government/education and services.

All of these customers are enjoying a higher level of reliability because of WebSphere Application Server. “By implementing load balancing with WebSphere Application Server, we can offer our customers application clusters. This provides them not only with additional reliability but increased performance,” Veasey says. “So we can have a failure on one application server node and it doesn’t negatively affect users of the system.”

Horizontal scalability, increased availability and faster performance are all benefits of the new ERP software with WebSphere Application Server. Says Veasey: “Even before the announcement of the general availability of the new technology, we’ve been part of the beta project focused on the capability of using IBM WebSphere to scale the application horizontally. The result is that we can provide increased application availability as well as better performance.”

“We have seen that the performance of the new application is significantly faster with the WebSphere Application Server,” says Veasey. Within its own customer population, netASPx foresees a 100 percent migration to Web access using WebSphere Application Server and IBM HTTP Server, as opposed to the client-based proprietary access method used before. This will save time and administrative costs for netASPx and its customers.

“The performance of the new release on WebSphere Application server, combined with the strength of the WebSphere product line, made for an easy decision to choose the WebSphere architecture and implement that over time for our entire customer base,” says Veasey.

Security to help meet compliance demands
For netASPx’s customers, compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley has never been more important as it is now. Regulated companies need to be able to demonstrate that they have application security procedures and roles defined and in place. They also need the application access documentation to support their security decisions. With IBM Tivoli Directory Server, customers now know that they have this type of application security built in.

Previously, organizations could not easily provide documentation proving who had access to what applications and what access rights were actually used. “Now customers are in a different position because not only can they prove who had access, they can also say why a particular person had access,” says Veasey. “We’ve moved to role-based security with authentication of users’ credentials based on the roles defined for them to perform. This is going to greatly streamline the compliance function on the part of a customer. It goes beyond just having documentation. It moves the client towards governance for their business-critical decisions.”

Veasey predicts that new customers will turn to netASPx to help them take advantage of the powerful new functionality of the new release. “We are a shortcut to value for our customers. Our hosted solution saves customers from having to acquire new hardware or fulfill new training and support requirements in order to manage Tivoli Directory Server and WebSphere Application Server. They don’t need to invest the capital to take advantage of WebSphere to scale the application across multiple, physical servers and reduce their single points of failure. With our infrastructure,” says Veasey, “we can quickly migrate customers and—with the depth of knowledge we have in our ERP vendor and IBM—we can provide all the functionality that they have put into their new releases.”

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.
Hardware: System i, System p, System x, System z
Software: Tivoli Directory Server, WebSphere Application Server

IBM SOA - IBM Business Partners and their customers speak about success with IBM software

IBM Business Partners and their customers speak about success with IBM software - IBM SOA customer - SOA in Healthcare Industry

IBM SOA Customer
Customer: Various
Deployment Country: United Kingdom
Industry: Chemicals & Petroleum, Consumer Products, Fabrication & Assembly, Government, Healthcare, Industrial Products, Media & Entertainment, Professional Services, Retail, Travel & Transportation
IBM SOA Solution: Enabling Business Flexibility, SOA Service Oriented Architecture

Overview
IBM® software is at the heart of many successful business operations. Tens of thousands of companies, working closely with IBM Business Partners, are developing innovative ways to do better business everyday by extending, developing and tailoring IBM software products to fit their precise business needs.

Business need: Companies of all kinds are looking to innovate and to make better use of their intellectual capital. The challenge is to find new and better ways to serve customers, while keeping a watchful eye on internal costs and efficiencies.

Solution: IBM Business Partners offer a range of tailored solutions, built on the foundations of software products from IBM.

Benefits: By working with IBM Business Partners to deploy IBM software solutions, companies can reduce costs, boost productivity, better integrate their systems, gain faster insight into changing market conditions, and improve customer service in all areas.

Case Study
IBM® software is at the heart of many successful business operations. Tens of thousands of companies, working closely with IBM Business Partners, are developing innovative ways to do better business everyday by extending, developing and tailoring IBM software products to fit their precise business needs.

IBM DB2® information management software provides access to diverse information easily and efficiently. Underlying the explosion in data collection and analysis, our information management portfolio focuses on managing that content - sharing and exploiting information to manage risk, inform decision-making, and achieve real business value, cost-effectively.

IBM Lotus® products focus on collaboration, teamwork, connectivity and learning, with advanced tools for organising workflows, publishing teamwork and creating communities.

IBM Rational® software is the development platform for advanced application development, designed to meet the need for rapid response to changing business conditions. Rational software enables new applications to be designed, built, tested and deployed, exploiting a high degree of automation, delivering cost-effective business solutions rapidly and reliably.

IBM Tivoli® solutions for growing businesses provides simple, fast, secure IT management assisting with the monitoring, management, protection, diagnosis and recovery of even the most diverse systems landscape. Take advantage of enterprise-class IT management on a midsize business budget with the IBM Tivoli® Express portfolio of storage, security, and availability IT management solutions which help ensure fast time-to-value for customer’s most critical business needs. These solutions are built with practical experience from working with mid-sized customers, leading Business Partners and industry experts.

IBM WebSphere® software helps business achieve flexibility and integration through service oriented architecture (SOA). With the WebSphere toolset, customers can integrate voice, mobile, Web and commercial operations into highly cost-effective business systems serving the needs of shareholders and customers alike.

To find out how customers of all varieties are using IBM software solutions to improve their businesses, please download the PDF at the top of this page.

IBM SOA - Cardinal Health partners with IBM to provide top-notch healthcare.

IBM SOA - Cardinal Health partners with IBM to provide top-notch healthcare. IBM SOA customer - SOA in Healthcare industry

“Our partnership with IBM is not just about hardware and software. In the end it’s about helping our custom­ers fulfill their mission of providing better health care to people around the world.” - Jeanne Lasheff, Vice President Application Services, Enterprise IT, Cardinal Health

IBM SOA Customer
Customer: Cardinal Health
Deployment Country: United States
Industry: Healthcare, Wholesale Distribution & Services

IBM SOA Solution: Autonomic Computing, Database Management, Enabling Business Flexibility, Information On Demand, Service Oriented Architecture

Overview
Cardinal Health is a US$81 billion global health care company, with 55,000 employees and operations in 29 countries on six continents. Cardinal Health is rated number 19 on Fortune Magazine’s list of the 500 largest U.S. companies. Cardinal Health manufactures, packages and distributes pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, offers a wide range of clinical services, and develops products that improve the management and delivery of supplies to hospitals, physician offices and pharmacies.

Business need: Cardinal Health recently began to transition from a holding company to an integrated operating company so that it could go to market with integrated solutions in supply chain management, medication management, clinical services and manufacturing. The new company vision led to a redesign of IT operations away from a business-unit focus and toward a company-wide IT service provider, with greater data integration, flexible access and delivery.

IBM SOA Solution: The solution incorporates IBM middleware, hardware, tools, services and technical support. Cardinal Health’s new infrastructure will be built around a service oriented architecture (SOA) model to increase its flexibility, responsive­ness and performance.

Benefits: OGTP and the SAP applications Cardinal Health has selected to deploy will be powered by the new DB2 9 data server, which is optimized to run SAP applications. The Cardinal Health DBA staff and BASIS development teams will both take advantage of the autonomic features of DB2 9, which make administrative tasks more seamless and transparent. In addition, Cardinal Health expects the new deep compression feature of DB2 9 to provide significant savings in storage hardware and associated costs.

Case Study Overview

Cardinal Health
Dublin, Ohio, United States
www.cardinal.com

Industries
• Healthcare
• Wholesale Distribution & Services

Products

• IBM DB2® 9 data server
• mySAP™ Business Suite applications
• IBM WebSphere BusinessIntegration software
• IBM WebSphere® Portal software
• IBM WebSphere CustomerCenter software
• IBM Rational® tools
• IBM System p™ servers
• IBM System x™ servers
• IBM System Storage™ technology
• IBM Global Services

“Our partnership with IBM is not just about hardware and software. In the end it’s about helping our customers fulfill their mission of providing better health care to people around the world.”
—Jeanne Lasheff, Vice President Application Services, Enterprise IT, Cardinal Health

Background
Cardinal Health is a US$81 billion global health care company, with 55,000 employees and operations in 29 countries on six continents. Cardinal Health is rated number 19 on Fortune Magazine’s list of the 500 largest U.S. companies.

Cardinal Health manufactures, packages and distributes pharmaceuticals and medical supplies, offers a wide range of clinical services, and develops products that improve the management and delivery of supplies to hospitals, physician offices and pharmacies.

Every day, Cardinal Health:

• Manufactures more than 4 million medical/surgical products that are used by 90 percent of all hospitals in the United States
• Manufactures more than 500 million doses of pharmaceuticals
• Makes 50,000 deliveries to 40,000 customer sites

Challenge
Cardinal Health recently began to transition from a holding company to an integrated operating company so that it could go to market with integrated solutions in supply chain management, medication management, clinical services and manufacturing. The new company vision led to a redesign of IT operations away from a business-unit focus and toward a company-wide IT service provider, with greater data integration, flexible access and delivery.

Last year, Cardinal Health committed to a multi-year migration to a standard, company-wide ERP system from SAP® as a key component to align business processes across the company. At the same time, Cardinal Health launched its One Global Technology Platform (OGTP) project. OGTP provides the technology infrastructure to support and enhance the SAP deployment enterprise-wide. Cardinal Health chose IBM as its strategic partner for OGTP, to help transform its technology environment quickly by implementing a robust infrastructure that would enable future growth, keep IT operating costs low and mitigate technology transformation risks.

SOA Solution
The solution incorporates IBM middleware, hardware, tools, services and technical support. Cardinal Health’s new infrastructure will be built around a service-oriented architecture (SOA) model to increase its flexibility, responsive­ness and performance.

Benefits
OGTP and the SAP applications Cardinal Health has selected to deploy will be powered by the new DB2 9 data server, which is optimized to run SAP applications. The Cardinal Health DBA staff and BASIS development teams will both take advantage of the autonomic features of DB2 9, which make administrative tasks such as installation and performance monitoring and tuning more seamless and transparent. In addition, Cardinal Health expects the new deep compression feature of DB2 9 to provide significant savings in storage hardware and associated costs.

Products and Services Used
IBM products and services that were used in this case study.

Hardware: System p, System x
Software: WebSphere Customer Center, DB2 9 for Linux, UNIX and Windows, WebSphere Portal, Rational Suite
Services: IBM Global Services