The Canadian health insurer Mediavie Blue Cross solved the problem it was experiencing with disparate legacy architecture by implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) comprising several Sun solutions. A first step in the migration involved deploying an enterprise-service bus (ESB) that integrates legacy applications to manage claims processing. In restructuring the company’s enterprise architecture, Mediavie IT personnel relied on Sun product managers, the open-source community, and Sun Educational Services for advice and training.

Mediavie was finding its legacy architecture too slow to handle the some 300,000 claims-processing events the provider experiences in a typical day. To add new services and facilitate system communications in the legacy architecture, developers had to create point-to-point interfaces. The labor intensive process did not allow the company to adapt to the rapid pace of 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.”

Medavie Blue Cross decided to migrate its IT environment to a service-oriented architecture (SOA) supported by an GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which 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. Medavie Blue Cross also chose to deploy 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 EE 5 — would also promote flexibility, eliminate vendor lock-in and accelerate developer productivity.

Mediavie outlined a timeline for the implementation of this SOA that begins with deployment of the GlassFish ESB in 2009; the implementation of the enterprise-wide SOA by 2011; and the replacement of all legacy technologies by 2012.

The company's IT staff attended training sessions led by Sun Educational Services to familiarize themselves with Sun technologies and SOAs, and then members of the developer staff began work on pilot project that uses GlassFish ESB to integrate three claims-processing systems. Once the systems were connected to the ESB, the team then 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.

Mediavie's Swansburg notes that deploying GlassFish ESB and OpenSSO gives the company the secure and agile infrastructure it needs to rapidly integrate its technologies in a noninvasive way, regardless of component 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.

As more applications are connected to the ESB, employees will gain real-time insight into more systems, which in turn will minimize duplicate efforts, boost productivity, speed time to market and cut costs.

More Information

Sun GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus (ESB)

Sun OpenSSO Enterprise

Java EE at a Glance

Benefits of Sun GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus 2.1

GlassFish Enterprise Service Bus Version 2.1

NetBeans IDE [...read more...]

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