Case Study: BenefitFocus

Healthcare Benefits Solution Provider Gains from Fast JMS and BizTalk Integration

Situation

A leader in providing Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions for the healthcare industry, Benefitfocus brings to market innovative products that give a competitive edge to carriers, employers and brokers while helping consumers to effectively manage their benefits. To create a rich online experience for carriers that sell and maintain healthcare plans, Benefitfocus integrates underlying applications for benefits administration, underwriting, direct marketing and sales. With an emphasis on simplifying or eliminating paper processes, Benefitfocus offers a wealth of solutions, including Benefitfocus eDirect™ for direct consumer online purchases and Benefitfocus eBilling™ for easy-to-use, secure online payments.

To merge different software systems and build applications that deliver highly effective business processes, Benefitfocus relies on Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 for its backend enterprise application infrastructure. In the process of building out its integration infrastructure, Benefitfocus needed a way for BizTalk to communicate reliably with Benefitfocus eEnrollment™, the Benefitfocus application that manages online enrollment. Integrating eEnrollment — a Java-based application — with BizTalk was critical in the customer onboarding process.

Challenge

“We had a strong need to integrate Java and .NET applications via our BizTalk infrastructure,” recalled Don Taylor, Chief Technology Officer of Benefitfocus. Java enterprise applications traditionally use JMS (Java Message Service), a standard messaging API that enables distributed communications and allows application components to create, send, receive and process messages. Software architects at Benefitfocus wanted the eEnrollment application to publish messages to a JMS queue, but they needed a dependable way for BizTalk to consume messages and support Java and .NET communications. Benefitfocus had only two months remaining in their software release cycle to complete this integration task.

When developers started to look at how to integrate BizTalk and JMS, they discovered open source code that could help them construct the needed solution. They began to build the open source code in a test environment, but soon hit a series of show-stopping bugs. “Because of time constraints, we had to reject the open source approach,” said Taylor, “The documentation was spotty, there was no formal support, and we faced the task of debugging the code ourselves within an extremely short project window.” In looking for an option that could be deployed quickly, yet with high reliability and low risk, developers found an off-the-shelf solution that did exactly what they wanted — the JNBridge JMS Adapter for BizTalk Server. Within just 45 days after downloading a free trial copy, Benefitfocus was in production with BizTalk, eEnrollment and the JNBridge adapter.

Solution

The JNBridge JMS Adapter for BizTalk Server encapsulates JMS client capabilities into a standard BizTalk adapter. The adapter is easily configured as endpoints that are specifically bound to send and receive ports, allowing a BizTalk orchestration to produce and consume messages to and from JMS queues and topics. The adapter is flexible and works with any JMS implementation.

“We had an immediate need with eEnrollment and anticipated that there were other Benefitfocus applications, such as eBilling and eSales, that we would want to integrate as well.” Based on proven success in deploying eEnrollment with the JNBridge JMS Adapter for BizTalk Server, Benefitfocus now uses the adapter to streamline other application integration tasks.

Benefits

During the evaluation of the JMS Adapter for BizTalk Server, developers at Benefitfocus found it completely met their expectations. They benefited from:

• Simplicity and ease-of-use. Developers were able to understand and implement the adapter quickly.
• Faster time-to-market. As a “drop-in” solution, the adapter helps Benefitfocus to bring applications to market on schedule — an accomplishment given the rapid development and quarterly release cycles of their SaaS products.
• Reliability. The adapter stands up to a high volume of customer interactions that produce a massive number of transactions. It easily meets the high level of quality and reliability that Benefitfocus demands.

“Bringing health insurance carriers onto our system involves a significant data exchange process,” said Taylor. “BizTalk is the endpoint for the carriers, so the JNBridge JMS Adapter for BizTalk Server occupies a crucial place in our application integration process.”

Get Started

To streamline BizTalk and JMS integration in your business and quickly achieve reliable application messaging, download a free trial copy of the adapter at www.jnbridge.com.