BITMARCK Improves Agility and Scalability of Java EE Applications for Public Health Insurance Companies with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

The BITMARCK group is Germany’s largest IT services provider for the public health insurance sector. The group consists of a holding company and five subsidiaries responsible for actual business operations. Stakeholders in the holding company are several German public health insurances who are also BITMARCK’s main customers. The BITMARCK group provides IT services, including software development, datacenter operations, networking infrastructure, and data processing services that ensure efficient, timely, and fully compliant transactions on behalf of 26 million insurance customers.

The health insurance sector in Germany is highly regulated and subject to continuous changes in procedures and compliance regulations set forth by the federal government. Not only do the public health insurance companies in Germany handle the reimbursement of medical treatments on behalf of insured patients, they also take care of collecting the insurance premiums directly from employers who are responsible for paying monthly fees on their employees’ behalf. Furthermore, these organisations have to observe a common financial balancing scheme that compensates for the risks that are usually unevenly distributed between them. Within this political framework, it is one of BITMARCK’s key tasks to provide a software infrastructure able to accommodate this complex environment. Simultaneously, the software must be flexible enough to dynamically incorporate changes in processes and the underlying data.

“Since the late 1990s, we have been constantly looking for ways to create an IT architecture that would be able to accommodate the dynamic and complex regulatory initiatives,” said Dirk Schäfers, chief infrastructure architect at BITMARCK Software. “It was clear very early on in the process that a software system that would meet these requirements would have to be unified, browser-based, and follow a model-driven approach to software development.”

Based on these prerequisites, BITMARCK selected a Java EE-based software architecture that would encompass both the middleware and the application layers. “In addition to agility, we were also looking for scalability,” said Schäfers. “In the early stages of our Java-based infrastructure implementation, we expected to serve approximately 50 to 100 users per customer, but we knew it wouldn’t remain that way for very long, as electronic processing of insurance incidents was becoming more common across the board. That was back in 2002, and today we’re very happy to have opted for Java EE, as it has helped us accommodate tremendous growth.”

BITMARCK made the definitive step to Java EE architecture in 2002, after evaluating a number of middleware options for the next-generation infrastructure. “We looked at the market incumbents, which back then were IBM WebSphere and BEA WebLogic–now Oracle WebLogic. The open source contender on the list was JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and it won in every respect,” said Schäfers. “JBoss Enterprise Application Platform turned out to provide the exact functionality and robustness we needed. It also offered better support and faster delivery of bug fixes, and the total cost of ownership (TCO) was considerably lower than the TCO for WebSphere and WebLogic.”

BITMARCK’s main application for insurance clerks has been in operation since 2005. The total number of users has increased to about 30,000 in about 160 public health insurance companies today, constantly testing the scalability of JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. “As we determine the entire software and hardware stack, all the way from the servers in our datacenters to the endusers’ desktops that run the common Java EE application in the browser, we have full control over the capabilities and performance of our systems,” said Schäfers. “This makes the delivery of a consistent user experience and achieving high availability of the systems much easier. And JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has been instrumental in driving the performance of our systems.”

By using JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and the Java EE framework for application development, BITMARCK has achieved a high degree of agility in software development. The development team delivers a new release of the core applications about every four weeks. ”Each new release includes many changes, from bug fixes to new features and newly defined processes reflecting changes in laws and regulations,” said Schäfers. “This speed and agility simply wouldn’t be possible without JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. Model-driven Java development is the key to our success here.”

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provides the scalability and robustness necessary to provide a complex and transaction-heavy application landscape to more than 30,000 end users in public health insurance companies across Germany. “To illustrate the power of the system, I will quote a couple of figures from a load test we recently completed,” said Schäfers. “We pushed about 425,000 use cases through the system in just four hours, resulting in about 51 million database server calls. The infrastructure didn’t fail once and delivered an average response time of below 600 milliseconds. That’s just a hint at how our systems based on JBoss Enterprise Application Platform make our customers happy.”

With the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform subscription, BITMARCK has access to an around-the-clock global network of experienced middleware support engineers. “Red Hat® Global Support Services is very quick at resolving issues and delivering patches if need be,” said Schäfers. “We have never regretted our selection of open source software.”