Medavie Blue Cross

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In 2007, Canadian health insurance provider Medavie Blue Cross knew its 20-year-old legacy architecture was nearing the end of its life. However, replacing aging components with new ones was time consuming and expensive. The existing architecture contained many legacy technologies including CICS/Cobol, Oracle Cleint Server and IBM WebSphere applications. To add new services and facilitate system communications, developers had to create point-to-point interfaces. Because the process was labor intensive the company could not rapidly adapt to change.

“We don’t want to modify our legacy systems if possible because they are not as resilient as newer technologies,” explains Darren Swansburg, enterprise architect at Medavie Blue Cross. “Legacy code changes can bring about instability.”

Many processes were duplicated across the organization, which slowed productivity. In addition, because existing systems used batch processing it was hard to deliver data in a timely fashion. To get information more quickly, employees could perform manual system queries, but this method was slow and cumbersome.

Medavie Blue Cross decided to migrate its IT environment to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) supported by an enterprise-service bus (ESB). Rather than requiring extensive code modifications, the ESB uses system events so that old and new technologies can communicate. To share information, applications simply connect to the platform-agnostic ESB and then publish information about system events or subscribe to events generated by other applications.

In 2007, Medavie Blue Cross evaluated SOA and ESB solutions from IBM, Oracle, and Sun — including Sun GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and Java Composite Application Platform Suite. After testing the products and consulting with Sun product managers, Medavie Blue Cross chose to deploy GlassFish ESB Enterprise Edition, along with Sun OpenSSO Enterprise to secure data. Built on open-source technologies, GlassFish ESB was extremely cost effective and came with support from Sun and the open-source community. The product’s standards-based development environment — Java Platform EE5 — would also promote flexibility, eliminate vendor lock-in and accelerate developer productivity.

In 2008, IT personnel designed a long-term architectural plan: the ESB would be deployed in 2009, the enterprise-wide SOA (which would integrate all systems) would be implemented by 2011 and all legacy technologies would be replaced by 2012. IT employees attended training sessions hosted by Sun Educational Services to learn more about Sun technologies and SOAs. In March 2008, three developers began work on a pilot project that uses GlassFish ESB to integrate three claims-processing systems. After connecting the systems to the ESB, the team used Metro Web Services, Java Message Service, and the NetBeans IDE to build Web services that can detect and publish system events that occur in the systems. To ensure the security of the system both from external and internal threats, the team used OpenSSO to embed security headers in Web services that encrypt communication between applications and the ESB. In May 2009, the pilot project entered its final testing phase and is expected to go into production in June 2009.

By deploying GlassFish ESB and OpenSSO, Medavie Blue Cross has the secure and agile infrastructure it needs to rapidly integrate its technologies in a noninvasive way, regardless of components’ age, vendor, or platform.

“Agility will come in two ways: we can change our systems more quickly, and we can increase the effectiveness of our business processes,” notes Swansburg. Today, corporate applications can subscribe to real-time events — totaling about 300,000 per day — that detail all claims-processing activities. As more applications are connected to the ESB, employees can gain real-time insight into more systems, which will minimize duplicate efforts, boost productivity, speed time to market and cut costs.