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