Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Rhode Island (BCBSRI) is one customer who's leveraged PowerBuilder and EAServer to develop an intranet solution. This application has provided BCBSRI with tremendous cost savings and enhanced performance.

Using Data to Everyone's Advantage
BCBSRI is the state's largest and only locally based health plan. Founded in 1939, BCBSRI provides health coverage for one out of every two Rhode Islanders. With more than 1,500 employees, it's also one of the 20 largest employers in the area.

Customer-Driven Solutions
BCBSRI is driven by the needs of its customers. Toward this end, the company relies on its customer service system to monitor and record communication with its policyholders. BCBSRI's mission is to be the local leader in coordinating and financing health-related benefits and providing quality health care and service in Rhode Island.

To help achieve the company's mission, BCBSRI's IT department was tasked with replacing its existing customer service system, which was proprietary and non-Y2K compliant. In an effort to serve its customers better and improve operational efficiency, the company decided to take its existing customer service application and deploy it on a three-tier architecture.

Moving to Three Tiers
BCBSRI originally explored the possibility of implementing an off-the-shelf CRM application but soon realized that this option would cost in excess of $1 million. Moreover, by integrating the new application, BCBSRI would have incurred additional costs and resources. The company's IT department convinced management that the best approach would be to use the company's existing PowerBuilder skill sets and investments and rebuild the customer service system instead.

Built with Sybase's EAServer and PowerBuilder, the newly developed intranet application allows a variety of lightweight clients to use business logic that sits in the middle tier on EAServer. The company chose EAServer and PowerBuilder because of their rapid development capabilities, scalability and tight integration across BCBSRI's infrastructure.

EAServer combines the capabilities of a component transaction server and a dynamic Web page server to provide a single point of integration for heterogeneous back-office systems. This has allowed BCBSRI to extend its existing PowerBuilder-based system and data safely and easily to a three-tier environment. With EAServer, BCBSRI could integrate its legacy and new-customer service data with the company's existing logic, which was located on an IBM mainframe. EAServer now acts as the focal point for access to several IBM legacy applications within the company, including IMS and DB2.

Significant Savings
By using its existing resources and skill sets, BCBSRI was able to implement a customer service system with a cost savings of more than $500,000. Because the new system borrowed from the previous system's user interface, the company also saved time and money by not having to retrain users on a new application.

The new EAServer-based system supports BCBSRI's 120-user customer service department, managing 1,800 calls per day and generating approximately 20,000 transactions - a significant performance gain over the previous customer service solution.

Application server technology is relatively new to the IT market, and organizations are still trying to grasp its true purpose in the enterprise. Those who can recognize the value of integrating existing data and applications stand to gain significant competitive advantage as they move to an e-business model. As an innovative e-business implementation, BCBSRI's newly enhanced customer service system offers a clear example of how application server technology can be used to an organization's fullest advantage - with a beneficial impact on customers as well.

Are you considering the advantages of an application server in designing your business's Web architecture? More and more PowerBuilder shops are discovering that EAServer is uniquely suited for deploying business logic via PowerBuilder NVOs in intranet- and Internet-based applications, as well as JavaBeans, COM and CORBA objects created by other development teams. You can find more success stories at www.sybase.com/success. Do you have an EAServer success story you'd like to share with us? If so, send an e-mail to ndavis@sybase.com.