Cars.com

GWC Customer Recognition Award Spotlight: Cars.com uses WebSphere and Ascendant to stay relevant

Cars.com faces the constant challenge to remain on the leading edge, so their development team must add new features regularly to remain a destination site in their space.

By adding a new social-oriented feature, cars.com helps maintain relevancy in the community.

The new dealer reviews application is hosted on WebSphere Application Server, with Process Server and DataPower used to handle service calls to a reputation management vendor, and WebSphere Portal provides an interface for dealers to manage a variety of transactions with Cars, including the ability to respond to consumer reviews.

Process Service and DataPower added a middle tier to give an SOA approach to communicating with a vendor. This deployment has made demonstrable improvements to the SOA Integration and Connectivity competencies in the cars.com WebSphere environment

As a result of this deployment, thousands of dealers have opted in to the Dealer Reviews product in the few weeks since launch, and hundred of reviews have been written.

Here is how the new feature looks and feels on the site:

Click image to enlarge

Click image to enlarge

KLM

GWC Customer Recognition Award Spotlight: KLM Achieves US$1 Million Annual Savings Using WebSphere and DeployIT

At KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, the Web Deployment department needs to handle a large project load,  typically working on 35 different projects simultaneously, with a total of around 400 Java™ 2, Enterprise Edition (J2EE™) application deployments per week.

However, the company’s home grown scripted deployment system had limited functionality and was inflexible and sensitive to errors. KLM faced problems and errors in over 70 percent of its software deployments, leading to issues with time to market for Web applications and operations costs. KLM wanted to increase the level of service while reducing costs and speeding development.

Elements contributing to the challenge were:

• A Significant part of not being able to deploy in time was caused by error sensitivity of manual actions in the hand-over of the software package(s) between development and operations: This caused a high error rate.
• Waiting time between dev and ops
• Manual deployment activities consuming much time
• Errors in deployments lead to bouncing of packages: costs rework and lots of idle wait time

KLM uses IBM WebSphere Application Server V5.1 and V6.1 software, IBM HTTP Server software, IBM WebSphere DataPower XS40 XML Security Gateway devices, IBM Tivoli® Directory Server software, IBM Tivoli Access Manager software with IBM WebSEAL technology, and IBM WebSphere MQ software to integrate with the company’s reservation system, which runs on an IBM System z® mainframe.

Together with XebiaLabs and Development colleagues implemented DeployIT with the WebSphere stack to create:

• Seamless integration with Development build environment
• Smart Deployment Automation with repository integration
• Developer Self Service Deployment facilities on test systems

The DeployIT solution running in the WebSphere environment helped KLM make significant improvements in their Business Process Management, SOA Integration and Connectivity, and Legacy Modernization and Service Enablement competencies.
BPM considerably simplified the deployment process and SOA increased control and ease of use in release management of SOA services deployed on WebSphere Application Server and DataPower.  Improved service enablement increased development speed of reusable services in the area of e-commerce and passenger self service.

With DeployIT for WebSphere, KLM is able to manage and configure mission-critical applications quickly and confidently, thereby reducing its dependency on specialized technology experts.  What’s more, the KLM Web Deployment department perception has been transformed from a bottleneck to an enabler of change.

The solution helped KLM reduce time to market for new applications by 10 percent, as well as realize savings of approximately US$1 million in man hours.

Mike Rodenburg, Chief Architect of B2C Infrastructure at KLM Royal Dutch Airlines summed it up this way, “Productivity increased across the board in our organization after this deployment. The automation has given the development team the ability to do things by themselves and freed up resources to do other things.  The predictive nature of the deployments now lets the team focus on more innovative business projects and tasks.”

To learn more about Xebia’s solutions for IT professionals using WebSphere products, go to: http://www.xebialabs.com/ibm-websphere-webinar-accelerate-time-to-market.

Premier Inc.

GWC Customer Recognition Award Spotlight: Premier Inc. Using New IBM/Perficient Technology Platform To Meet Regulatory, Member Demands 

Premier has embarked on a mission to enable their 2,400 members to use financial and clinical information in a more structured, consistent and flexible environment that enables Premier to meet the fast paced changing regulatory as well as member demands and needs.  In creating this new framework, Premier has the capacity to be more responsive and can provide innovative products that will enable their members to improve and transform their healthcare delivery systems.  Premier is creating a solution that will support the processes around the collection, analysis and reporting of clinical and financial information in a consistent and repeatable process.

More than 2,400 hospitals and thousands of other healthcare sites stand to benefit from this model to help improve clinical outcomes, reduce waste and prepare for new methods of delivering care required by health reform.  Premier (along with IBM and Perficient) has developed an industry-first technology platform to gain insights on, measure and improve the health of the population. This platform supports hospitals, doctors and other health providers in working together to enhance patient safety while reducing the overuse of procedures, readmissions, unnecessary ER visits and hospital-acquired conditions.  Enhanced use of health data is needed to reduce fragmentation of medical information that results in higher medical costs and increased likelihood of adverse medical events. In most healthcare settings, the data needed to make these improvements is stored in many different formats and multiple locations. This same information also needs to be made more accessible to support accountable care organizations mandated under the Affordable Care Act that reimburse providers for quality of care, not volume of care.

The WebSphere HL7 ESB is being used to acquire and populate the healthcare data model to provide a single view of the constituent or entity. WebSphere ILOG software provides clinical and business rules management. The deployment of these technologies, along with Perficient’s solution will make measurable improvements in SOA Integration and Connectivity and Empowering Line of Business with Business & Event Rules Management.

This solution, once fully deployed will revolutionize the healthcare industry by improving outcomes, reducing readmissions and eliminating duplicative and unnecessary care. Doctors, hospitals and insurance companies using information-sharing platforms set the true foundation for redesigning how healthcare is delivered and paid for.  For patients, this means greater certainty they will get the most effective treatment possible. It will also provide better assurance that the care they receive follows best practices from leading hospitals and healthcare experts across the nation. In addition, the model will enable comparative effectiveness by demonstrating how effectively various medical treatments improve health outcomes and conditions.

TELUS

GWC Customer Recognition Award Spotlight: TELUS and SOA Software reduce the time and cost of web-service lifecycle changes
 

TELUS is a committed customer of the WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances. As part of their Service Delivery Framework program, TELUS exposes telco capabilities to their partners via web services; they rely on the DataPower appliances as part of our service exposure infrastructure, infrastructure that helps us automate the process of onboarding new partners via; https://partners.telus.com/  

TELUS’ challenge was to reduce the time and cost to TELUS of web-service lifecycle changes, and to further reduce costly downtown and re-work resulting from human error during complex deployments. As their infrastructure grew in size, scale and complexity, exposing services to partners became more expensive. They began looking for a solution that would allow them to reduce the administration and management costs for web-service lifecycle changes in their infrastructure.

TELUS is also an SOA Software customer, relying on Repository Manager, Service Manager and Policy Manager to help them manage, automate and govern web-service lifecycles. As a number of SOA Software customers are also satisfied WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance customers, SOA Software offered TELUS a solution that allowed them to leverage the best features of both solutions.
   
SOA Software developed new integration components that enabled TELUS to leverage their investment in SOA Software and IBM products, and retain the advantages associated with the best features of both.

With SOA Software and support from IBM, they successfully demonstrated the integration of SOA Software's Service Manager with their DataPower appliances to automate the deployment and routine management of web-services exposed to TELUS partners.

TELUS used the WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliance, model XI-50 to make significant improvement in SOA Integration and Connectivity. By leveraging the SOA Software DataPower integration components, TELUS is able to shorten their maintenance windows, resulting in less web-service downtime, and to reduce the incidence of error introduced during web-service lifecycle events and deployments.  These translate into better service for their partners and customers, and significantly reduced costs for TELUS.  This automated solution also allows them to scale up their infrastructure while keeping their management and maintenance costs at lower-than-projected levels.
   
The overall Service Delivery Framework program has helped TELUS to reduce the time taken to onboard partners, from months to days. By leveraging the SOA Software DataPower integration components, they reduce various aspects of the service delivery lifecycles even further. Examples of these include, reducing their typical maintenance window from 4 hours to 2 hours and reducing their change-related problem incident count from 2 per year, to 0.5 per year (1 every 2 years).