IBM mainframe makes it possible

  Overview

Duane Wesenberg
Vice President, Enterprise Applications
Aurora Health Care

Aurora Healthcare is an integrated delivery network. We have retail pharmacy. We have consolidated labs. We have Visiting Nurse's Association. All of those are integrated to deliver a continuum of care. It's just not about hospitals and clinics.

Tony Finn
Manager Web Applications Development
Aurora Health Care

We are really trying to -- as best we can -- simplify access and use our facilities for our patients. We want to make the healthcare experience as simple and easy-to-use for people.

  Competitive Advantages

Duane Wesenberg:
IBM and System Z has allowed us to always be on, always be available -- which, naturally, gives you a competitive advantage.

Tony Finn:
What we wanted to make sure of was that we had best-of-breed. The best operational systems that we could extend and web-enable. When you talk about modernization, System Z has all the tools, platforms, services, middleware -- technology -- that any other platform has. It just does it better.

  Benefits

Gary Weckworth
Director, Technical Services / Operations

The IBM benefits on System Z, to me, are the 3 big ones. Reliability, scalability and performance. If you look at it, those are the pillars that we need to drive for value-add to our customers. My thought was always that we could do that on System Z. We had the staff and we had the experience to do that. And IBM has the technology.

Security was very important. It's one of the attractions on the "Z" Series. We had the cryptographic processor built in. We were able to take advantage of that immediately. That was one of the large selling points when we started the journey on WebSphere Z, because it was available there, and we didn't have to buy another physical server. It was available. It was integrated right in. And it's been upgraded since then, so we're very happy with the security that it provides.

  Integration

Duane Wesenberg:
System Z Platform currently is used for all of our enterprise resource planning. Our ERP Suite. We knew service-oriented architecture was going to be the future, and it actually is here. And when we looked at all of our access to information, accounts receivable, accounts payable materials -- the supply-chain, HR data -- it was all on System Z, already. So we just had to release it. We just had to open up the box. And that's how we did it with WebSphere J2EE. A portal-access layer, all through the browser.

Gary Weckworth:
On System Z Platform, we now have a portal for 26,000 employees. They're able to gain access to all the web apps via the web. It's a tremendous advantage for us to do that. Before, we never had that. Everyone had a 3270 type terminal. And now, using our web apps and our own portal, we're able to provide access for all our employees, anywhere in the world.

  Vision

Duane Wesenberg:
So I don't have to worry about the technical services pieces. I don't have to worry about the network. I know they're there. I know they're on. So one of the interesting things is it's not my department. It's information technology, adding value to the business. That's the change with service-oriented architecture and open standards and System Z.

I believe the differentiator that Aurora has in the marketplace is information-sharing and knowledge-sharing, and the concept of transparency and transformation. What's important is the Aurora vision and the philosophy to take out that complexity. To make it a continuum of care, so that the systems are natural and they're not complex. They're almost hidden to the patients' view. So that you do have a person-to-person experience. That's what people actually want in healthcare.

There's a lot of technology and a lot of technology is purchased and moved in and out of healthcare. But at the end of the day, it's actually a person talking to a person, receiving the benefit of healthcare. That was the whole vision of bringing out an SOA architecture, and taking all of these disparate systems and aggregating them into a single view.