Xerox Capital Services (XCS)
XCS is a joint venture between GE Capital Vendor Financial Services and Xerox.

Business Problem
Xerox Capital Services needed to improve the process of obtaining information to review, inspect, approve and pay invoices. This process needed to enable invoicing through multiple channels.
An additional process needed to be developed to conduct credit analysis for Xerox customers. The way the existing application interfaced with external credit reporting agencies was through batch feeds and they needed to be redesigned so that credit decisions could be done in real-time.

Solution
XCS and GE did not want to rewrite the existing applications to communicate with the external invoicing and credit reporting companies. A design to use WebSphere Message Broker architecture was implemented to format and route the request messages to the appropriate destinations and then format the responses back into the requestor’s user database.

Impact
XCS was able to interface their existing applications to the WebSphere MQ Hub to allow a quicker rollout compared to rewriting their existing applications. By using the WebSphere Message Broker Hub and Spoke topology, WebSphere MQ Queue Manager Clustering and Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) configuration, XCS was able to implement a truly highly available and robust architecture. New interfaces can be seamlessly added to the architecture with minimal effort. With the Queue Manager Clustering and VCS configuration, upgrades at both the operating system and application level can be performed without impacting the availability of the environment.

Technologies Utilized
• WebSphere MQ
• WebSphere Message Broker
• Custom HTTP/S Java Message Broker Node
• Veritas Cluster Server (VCS)

Anything to Anything Architecture

Business Problem
It is a growing dilemma in today’s world – more and more information is gathered by remote resources like sensors, consumer data, cell phones, web usage, etc. Making it useful has become the business problem of today, and of the future. It is often unclear as to how can you use your data for a competitive advantage.

Solution
There are many sources of data that can help business processes and improve your results. Getting it, and making it useful is the key. We first identify the data you need, gather it together and make it so that you can store the data and still maintain a pipeline to the source.
By transforming the data into usable forms and applying expert knowledge (via an interface), the data is made useful and loaded with the business rules that you need to utilize it as a decision-making tool.

Learn More: The Aware Network

Impact
Now that you have access to useful data, that means that automated applications, your analysts, subject matter experts, managers, and decision makers can send alerts, run scenarios, and give approvals that will directly assist in the determination of future paths for your business.

Healthcare Insurance Company
A regional healthcare insurer headquartered in Buffalo, NY, and a major force in the provision of health care benefits in the northeast, with a concentration in Western New York. The company prides itself in its ability to successfully satisfy its membership base as is evident by its consistently high ranking among top health plans nationally.

Business Problem:
Rapid growth created the need to align the company’s application portfolio to better support the business direction. The new application would need to coexist with an already heterogeneous mix of legacy applications. Time to deliver was a big factor in an aggressive plan to deliver affordable functionality to its membership that the IT staff could efficiently support. This all needed to be done with no interruption in current customer services levels.

Solution:
A pilot was built to allow the IT staff to experience for themselves the impact of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). A benchmark exercise was done to understand how the solution would scale and outline total cost of ownership over the next 4-5 years. The Pilot had to access the current legacy system using various approaches including HTTP calls, SOAP Web Service Calls and invoking stored procedures. This was all done without changing the legacy application.

Impact:
The integration framework put in place was extensible, manageable, scalable, maintainable and, most of all, able to be leveraged. The ESB addressed the short-term business needs quickly while providing a basis for the IT organization to build upon for future success. The ability to reliably handle data in any format from multiple sources over multiple protocols in an efficient manner was pivotal in IT’s ability to support the business initiatives.

Technologies Utilized:
• WebSphere MQ
• WebSphere Message Broker
• DB2
• Java
• SQL

McGraw-Hill Companies
Founded in 1888, The McGraw-Hill Companies (NYSE: MHP) is a leading global information services provider meeting worldwide needs in the financial services, education and business information markets through leading brands such as Standard & Poor's, McGraw-Hill Education, BusinessWeek and J.D. Power and Associates. The Corporation has more than 280 offices in 40 countries. Sales in 2007 were $6.8 billion.

Platts
Platts, a division of The McGraw-Hill Companies, is a leading global provider of energy and metals information. With nearly a century of business experience, Platts serves customers across more than 150 countries. From 14 offices worldwide, Platts serves the oil, natural gas, electricity, nuclear power, coal, petrochemical and metals markets.
Platts' real time news, pricing, analytical services, and conferences help markets operate with transparency and efficiency. Traders, risk managers, analysts and industry leaders depend upon Platts to help them make better trading and investment decisions.

Business Problem:
McGraw-Hill was utilizing WebSphere MQ to distribute XML data to and from its vendor partners. The system did not provide permissioning or filtering of data content. This forced the vendors to process duplicate, unnecessary tags when processing the data, which caused an extra burden to the vendor and increased the bandwidth requirements between McGraw-Hill and its partners.

Solution:
WebSphere Message Broker was utilized to eliminate unnecessary content currently embedded in the XML feed while adding the required mechanism to control distribution of content to an individual consumer. Additional functionality allows custom data feeds (Analytics Data) to be integrated into the solution in a seamless way.

Impact:
This WebSphere Message Broker solution was completed on time and on budget. During testing and validation it was discovered that the original volume expectations of transactions from the custom data feeds (Analytics Data) was underestimated by a factor of 200%. Even with this increase of transactions, the Message Broker still met the SLA requirements for all transactions being processed through the environment. By having the same technical resource deliver the four day Developer Training for WebSphere Message Broker, the students were able to walk through the specific code that they were going to see in their environment. This helped them understand the functionality of the solution that was put in place at McGraw Hill.

Technologies Utilized:
• WebSphere MQ
• WebSphere Message Broker

Excellus BlueCross BlueShield
Excellus BlueCross BlueShield, headquartered in Rochester, NY, is part of a $4 billion family of companies that finances and delivers health care services across upstate New York and long-term care insurance nationwide. Collectively, the enterprise provides health insurance to more than 2 million people and employs more than 6,000 New Yorkers.

Business Problem:
Several company acquisitions resulted in different business procedures and practices being utilized to perform Membership Maintenance. This made it very difficult to leverage staff capabilities across "old" company boundaries, thus restricting the ability to make the customer service group more efficient. The company also wanted to be able to leverage the legacy system assets they acquired without interrupting users of those systems.

Solution:
Leveraging revamped the Membership Maintenance process to improve quality of data, support staff efficiency and flexibility and reduce training cost. BPM was used to choreograph web services and create an Enterprise Transaction Manager that both integrates with operational systems and facilitates automated and manual processes. A major component of the solution is an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) which supported a new more intuitive user interface for real time integration to legacy systems, and also supported batch workloads. Emitting process data at critical points in the process allowed the organization to refine the business process with greater effectiveness.

Impact:
The users found the solution to be robust, very responsive and easy to use. The deployment went in flawlessly with no outages, and did not impact existing service level agreements. The business process became more transparent and consistent across the company allowing for the customer service groups to assist each other in times of heavy workloads. Training time was reduced from weeks to days allowing for the quick augmentation of the customer service staff. The business benefited from descriptive detail directly related to the business process allowing it to further refine the business process effectively. This data could now be used to alter legacy systems and offer more effective personnel staff training to improve their Membership Maintenance process.

Technologies Utilized:
• WebSphere Application Server/Network Deployment
• WebSphere MQ
• DB2 (Linux / z/OS)
• WebSphere Message Broker
• Spring / Hibernate
• Business Process Modeling
• WebSphere HTTP and Application Server
• z/Linux
• BPEL
• Java/J2EE/EJB
• Web User Interface
• SQL
• Common Business Event