Agenda

• Overview of BCBSSC

• BCBSSC Web and Desk Top applications

• BCBSSC and SOA

• SOA Thoughts

• BCBSSC & SOA Express

• Q &A

Overview of BCBSSC

• BCBSSC has represented the BlueCross BlueShield brand in South Carolina for 61years

• BCBSSC is a mutual insurance company and includes numerous “Companion” subsidiaries

Dealing with Life Insurance, Property & Casualty, HMO, Technology, Data Center Services, etc…..

• Major governmental contracts dealing with Medicare, TRICARE, VA Hero

BCBSSCInformation Systems (I/S) Division

• Centralized IT organization supporting systems development and data center.

• I/S Division provides support for BCBSSC and well as out-sourcing support for external clients Business within a business

• Well respected for technology advancements within BCA family.

• Recent contract awarded as one of three data centers supporting CMS (Medicare)

My Role within the I/S Organization

• Director, Internal Resource Management (IRM)

Programming Support• Manage the existence and support for all internal tools• Liaison between Development staff and Tech Support

Recovery Management Analytics Quality Assurance

Focus on Core Competency

One of the I/S Guiding Principles for the last 20+ years has been to focus on our core competency.

Developing and supporting software that support the Health Insurance industry with unique functions and features that differentiate a client from their competition

To achieve this we leverage other companies core competencies for specialized knowledge and technology offerings.

Ex: 1. Clinical Management software -Contains in depth medial knowledge of treatment

plans and case studies

2. SOA Express code generatorWeb Services generation, LINK3270 expertise

BCBSSC Web and Desktop Applications

• BCBSSC Web and Desktop applications have been highly functional (not just text) from day one.

• They are true portals into our core applications.

• Have received numerous National, Regional and State awards

BCBSSC Web and Desktop Applications

• However, the underlying technology is antiquated and reaching its limit to handle the growing level of usage.

Under TN3270 each screen “action” requires communications to occur across

the network with each screen action. The response time is the same as any

user accessing the information through normal green screens.

CICS Test Region

Web ServerHTTP(S)

WorkstationWebPack Server

ClientSoft Proprietary

TN32

70

MQ Client

Screen Scraping

• The following Architectural principles have been engrained into BCBSSC’s development strategy for 20+ years Modularity Loose coupling Reuse Encapsulation Flexibility

• SOA is today’s packaging of these long standing principles

• Web Services is a communication protocol that provides support for these principles within today’s technology

SOA – Service Oriented Architecture

SOA Express code generator enables IT organizations to capture complete CICS business processes and

produces industry-standard components in the form of JavaBeans, EJBs, COM, Web Services and XML that

are reusable throughout the enterprise.

We are leveraging Micro Focus’ core competency to generate the appropriate code, while we focus on

the insurance industry.

We can modernize the application without having to develop expertise in the technology.

MFEEE SOA Capability -SOA Express

CICS Region

Web ServerHTTP(S)

WorkstationWebShere Server

TCP/IP

MQ

MQ Client

SOA ExpressGenerated

COBOLProgram

CICS TXNLINK3270

Transaction Scraping

Web Service

BCBSSC Web and Desktop applications

• SOA Express code generator provides a SOA standard presentation layer for mainframe applications with extraordinary performance.

• LINK3270 high speed CICS interface provides program to program interaction moving the processing logic to the mainframe.

SOA Express generates the entire component, middleware and back-end source code needed to access mainframe CICS applications with the latest technologies. No hand coding or changes to existing systems is required.

MFEEE SOA CapabilitySOA Express

CICS Region

MQInterface

3270Bridge

Users 3270TXs

Users 3270TXs

ApplicationServer

ApplicationServer

Generated

MQInterface

Java Bean(or EJB)

SOAPRouter

MQ

COBOLService

UsersCommareaPrograms

COBOLService

UsersCommareaPrograms

Web ServicesClient

application

Web ServicesClient

application

UDDIUDDI

WSDL

AutomatedPublishing

AutomatedDeployment

COBOLService

DataAccess

Component

CG Server Runtime

COBOLService

TestClient

Application

SOA Express – Results

Response Time Improvement• MQ & LINK3270 versus TN3270 Response Time

improved from 8 to 10 foldCompare WebPack vs Web Service Determine ID

0

500

1000

1500

2000

2500

3000

1 4 7 10 13 16 19 22 25 28 31 34 37 40 43 46 49 52 55 58 61 64 67 70 73 76 79 82 85 88 91 94 97 100

Iteration

Tim

e (m

s)

Webpack DB Web Service DB Linear (Webpack DB) Linear (Web Service DB)

.12 seconds versus

1.02 seconds

SOA Express – Results

Response Time Improvement• Customer Desk Top experiences 2-12 fold

improvement based upon data volumeCSR Desktop Performance, Health

0.00s

5.00s

10.00s

15.00s

20.00s

25.00s

30.00s

0 181

Number of Claims

Re

spo

nse

Tim

e (

s)

WebPack

Comp. Gen.

SOA Express – Results

Scalable with minimal overhead

MQ & LINK3270 leverage Host scalability capabilities

CICS Test Region

UDDI Server

Web Server

HTTP(S)TCP/IP

TCP/IP TCP/IP

TCP/IP

Test Workstation

WebSphere 6.0J2EE App Server

MVS MQ Server

MQ Client

The NEXT Level of Scalability:Through WebSphere Application Server for LINUX under z/OS the

execution of our generated services will occur on the Enterprise Server.Providing further performance and scalability improvements.

SOA Express – Results

z/OS VM

LINUX

Web Sphere

Enterprise Server

Coding done at application logical level not requiring CICS, Web Service, LINK3270 detailed technical knowledge

CICS Transaction

and Presentation

Layer Independence

SOA Express – Results

• Deployment options independent of Service navigation logic

Middleware Independence and Flexibility

• Through utilizing a code generator the following will be achieved Code Consistency

Reduction in volume of code to maintain

Increased productivity

SOA Express – Results

Micro Focus Core CompetenciesWe Have and Will Be Leveraging

Application Code Generation COBOL expertise

Teleprocessing Interface Link3270

Middleware Interface MQ

SOA Code Generation Web Services EJB

Q & A