COMPANIES: Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) and Rivet Logic

CATEGORY: Optimized Systems

INDUSTRY: Publishing

GEOGRAPHY: Cambridge, Massachusetts

BUSINESS CHALLENGE: The HBP’s ability to get new products to market and the quality of the customer experience at its e-commerce site were hindered by a proprietary operating system, a difficult-to-use legacy content management system (CMS), and inflexible customer-facing Web applications, which were negatively impacting the HBP’s revenues and limiting growth

MIGRATION PATH: From a proprietary operating system running a proprietary legacy CMS application to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform running the Alfresco Content Management System

SOFTWARE: Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform and Frameworks including JBoss Seam, JBoss Hibernate, jBPM, Oracle Database, and Alfresco’s open source Content Management System

HARDWARE: Intel™ Xeon™ processor-based Dell™ 2950 multicore servers

BENEFITS: Increased employee productivity, lowered IT operational costs, and increased Web site traffic and e-commerce transactions

Download the PDF case study

BACKGROUND
Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) is a not-for-profit, wholly-owned subsidiary of Harvard University which publishes a range of content – both print and online – bridging the knowledge gap between academic and the corporate world. It serves three primary markets: academic, enterprise, and individual managers. With more than 250 employees, the HBP’s mission is to explore and improve management practices around the world. HBP’s major Web properties include the online version of Harvard Business Review (hbr.org), Harvard Business Digital (harvardbusiness.org), and Higher Education (www.hbsp.harvard.edu). Rivet Logic and HBP were selected for the Optimized Systems Innovation Award for the use open source solutions from Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco that have enabled increased stability and the ability to develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions that help organizations engage with customers, improve collaboration, and streamline operations. The company offers a full suite of JBoss professional services – including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack. With complementary expertise in the Alfresco content management platform, Rivet Logic offers integrated, content-rich, and Web-oriented architecture (WOA)-enabled solutions that power a new generation of interactive Web properties, enterprise intranet applications, and collaborative Web 2.0 communities.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
To stay innovative and develop new products faster, HBP’s business users require the ability to easily access and use content from a variety of systems across the range of HBP business units. But the existing aging content management system was limiting access to only a few trained power users, which routinely resulted in productivity bottlenecks across all units.

To further challenge the workflow and production of HBP products, critical content resided on various shared drives across the enterprise or was locked up in the proprietary system, making it increasingly difficult for HBP to repurpose existing content into the kind of new digital media products that the fast-moving business information marketplace was seeking.

“Strategically, HBP knew it needed to transform itself from a print organization – which what it was for the past 10 to 20 years – to a digital media organization,” said Mike Vertal, CEO of Rivet Logic Corporation, a professional open source services and solutions firm hired by the HBP to reengineer the core IT platform and mission-critical applications.

The growing array of aging and disparate legacy middleware and operating systems used to run HBP’s Web sites was also proving increasingly unstable. The system routinely caused integration hurdles, IT bottlenecks, and escalating operational costs due to personnel overhead and software licensing fees. The lack of easy-to-use Web publishing tools hindered the editorial staff’s ability to deliver fresh and innovative content and, consequently, limited HBP’s ability to drive site traffic and therefore the ad revenue and e-commerce transactions that contributed directly to the firm’s bottom line.

In addition to the financial overhead due to high software licensing and maintenance costs, a large percentage of IT operational costs and human resources were spent just keeping the old systems running, leaving little time and resources for developing innovative new products. The proprietary legacy systems were difficult to customize and integrate, and could not scale to keep pace with HBP’s expanding business.

SOLUTION
HBP recognized it needed to replace its proprietary content management system with a robust, yet easy-to-use enterprise-grade content management system that would facilitate access to its high-value content to its business users and integrate seamlessly with existing systems such as enterprise content repositories, search and merchandising tools, e-commerce systems, ad networks, Web analytics, and community-building applications such as blogs.

HBP required a solution that provided increased flexibility around page design and messaging, easy access to digital products, a uniform user experience, easy-to-use e-commerce experience, and improved visitor experience for user registration and session management. HBP also sought a higher level of performance, scalability, and rock-solid stability.

One absolutely non-negotiable requirement: the new solution needed to be built with open source software and an open architecture with an enterprise Java foundation at the core. It also needed to support rapid, lightweight development at the upper layers of the application stack – most notably at the user interface layer and presentation tier. This requirement would focus on HBP’s business goals and on leveraging HBP’s very high-value content and core capabilities to enable future innovation.

This is where Rivet Logic came in. Rivet Logic provides professional open source services and solutions and offers a full suite of JBoss professional services including deployment, customization, and integration – enabling clients to fully leverage the power of the world’s leading open source enterprise middleware stack.

Rivet Logic implemented an end-to-end open source solution that delivered on all of HBP’s requirements. HBP’s production ecosystem was built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on Intel Xeon processor-based Dell 2950 servers with dual and quad core CPUs, running JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Apache, Oracle Database, and the Alfresco Content Management System.

JBoss Enterprise Application Platform was used as a core component for the dynamic content delivery system and e-commerce experience. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the basis for a WOA that enabled straightforward integration with numerous enterprise back-end systems and third-party Web services, including enterprise resource management (ERP), ad servers, XML repositories, taxonomy management, third-party search, Web analytics, and a user ID management system.

In addition, JBoss Seam served as the rich user interface (UI) framework for an intranet application for enterprise content management, and the public-facing Web applications for the online versions of Harvard Business Review at hbr.org, HBP’s e-commerce site at harvardbusiness.org, and HBP’s Higher Education site at www.hbsp.harvard.edu. In all cases, the JBoss Seam applications were integrated with Alfresco for back-end content management. The intranet application utilized Alfresco’s document management (DM) repository, whereas the Web site applications utilized Alfresco’s Web content management (WCM) repository.

JBoss Hibernate provided the persistence layer for all application logic and user-generated content, and jBPM governed workflow for editorial content and publishing processes. The JBoss Enterprise Application Platform provided the foundation necessary for HBP’s mission-critical applications that required high performance and scalability. Rivet Logic used a WOA approach for the need for single-sign-on support, while also enabling integration with a variety of systems, including a blogging platform (blogs.harvardbusiness.org), e-commerce, an XML repository (for HBR article content), and community platforms. Integration with a third-party search engine offered powerful faceted search and navigation functionalities. This content delivery approach also met standards-compliant XHTML/CSS requirements, maintained SEO-friendly URLs, and allowed for straightforward integration of Web analytics. Integration between JBoss and Alfresco was streamlined by using free and open source software from Rivet Logic, including the Remote Alfresco API rivet for Alfresco DM integration and the Crafter rivet for Alfresco.

The JBoss Seam intranet application allows enterprise users to:

- Navigate, search, find and retrieve relevant content quickly through a combination of full-text search, metadata search, and content relationship browsing

- Create and enter new content and associate metadata and relationships

- Manage digital rights of product-related media

- Restrict access to certain types of content through role-based user authorization

“The new JBoss and Alfresco based intranet provides an easy way for end-users to search and find content, as the search results deliver detailed content, such as individual chapters, images, author bios and the public-facing HBP site provides visitors a rich experience for navigating and consuming HBP’s digital content,” said Vertal, “The JBoss and Alfresco based Web content delivery system provides the dynamic and feature-rich functionalities HBP needed in a simplified manner by seamlessly connecting the presentation, application and content repository layers.”

BENEFITS
By using Red Hat, JBoss, and Alfresco open source solutions, HBP has gained platform agility that enables brand management, broader community functionality, and increased site traffic. The JBoss and Alfresco integrated solution has enabled HBP to gain the stability and ease of use it required to empower business end users and integrate with a host of critical applications and systems. With the new system in place, HBP can now develop products faster, bundle existing products more efficiently, and generate new revenue opportunities by increasing site traffic and offering richer, fresher, and more varied content.

From a developer perspective, HBP’s IT department can now focus on value-added development of new application and site features given the open source architecture and the modern WOA infrastructure. Dramatically less time and resources are now spent on maintaining rigid, legacy systems that carried expensive maintenance and software licensing costs.

The new implementation has enabled HBP to better leverage the value of its branded content, including articles, books and book chapters, blogs, podcasts, and videos – easily, quickly and securely.

“Uniting all content across the enterprise led to the rapid development of new digital media products and richer content on HBP’s revenue-generating Web properties,” said Vertal, “With Red Hat, JBoss and Alfresco, HBP has enhanced the visitor experience with improved navigation, along with much faster Web site performance. By offering fresher and more dynamic content and increasing site traffic, HBP has started to expand its revenue opportunities.”

“This project was as mission-critical as they come,” said Vertal. “It encompassed the back-end repository, the front-end application that internal users deployed to create new content and products, and a customer-facing Web application that delivered those products to customers through a variety of channels. Red Hat Enterprise Linux coupled with JBoss Enterprise Application Platform drove a total transformation of the way that HPB approached product development and delivery.”

Business agility has also increased by orders of magnitude, said Vertal. “Because we were on the new platform, in a matter of months we were able to replace the entire e-commerce front end with a much better user experience and more manageable applications.”

The stability of the system has also proven itself. And, looking forward, HBP has plans to begin incorporating social media into the site using collaborative tools and community applications that will enable its employees to become better engaged with customers. “This will allow HBP to build and maintain better customer loyalty across its entire customer base,” said Vertal.

“We utilized leading edge, open source platforms from Red Hat, Alfresco, and Rivet Logic to implement a large-scale, high-value, business-critical solution that spans internal enterprise collaboration applications, public-facing Web properties and communities, and business-critical e-commerce applications,” said Vertal, “We believe this project demonstrates the powerful benefits that commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss and the open source ecosystem is ready to deliver to major enterprises for the converged world of content, community, collaboration, and commerce.”
CUSTOMER ADVICE

“Any enterprise or government agency that is looking to increase employee productivity and/or improve relationships with customers should seek to leverage next-generation solutions that expand their use of content, community, collaboration, and community. And just as the consumer Web 2.0 was built on open source software, these next generation Enterprise 2.0 solutions are being built on enterprise-grade, commercial open source software from Red Hat, JBoss, Alfresco, and others. All organizations should seek to leverage commercial open source software as much as possible for any and all future enterprise software initiatives,” said Vertal.

“Businesses should remember that software is a means to an end, not an end in itself. Companies should first focus on business requirements and desired results, and leverage the best-of-breed software technologies that will help them get there. And whether the business needs better internal-facing, content-enabled enterprise applications, improved external-facing Web properties, or e-commerce platforms, JBoss software has proven it can help deliver tremendous bottom- line results,” said Vertal.

FAST FACTS

Industry: Healthcare

Geography: Singapore

Business Challenge: Needed a solution to enable them to proactively monitor, track and respond in terms of bed usage and associated resources

Migration Path: Paper-based system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform

Red Hat Alliance Partner: Y3 Technologies Pte Ltd

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Hardware: IBM PowerSeries 2 P6-570 virutalized server running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Benefits: Bed management solution improved bed turnaround, and thus staff productivity; real-time information enables staff to provide improved patient care

“Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, together with Y3, offered a unique solution that met our needs and exceeded our expectations.”
– Fong Yong Choi, MIS manager at MAH

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
Mount Alvernia Hospital (MAH) began as a 60-bed private hospital in Singapore in 1961, and has since grown to a 303-bed general hospital. The hospital provides services to local medical, surgical, pediatric, and maternity patients, and offers a comprehensive range of specialities. In addition, MAH has two medical centres, which are occupied by consultants who provide a wide range of medical and surgical specialist services.

MAH ensures that its facilities are constantly upgraded to keep abreast of advancements in medical technology and techniques.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
As MAH operates round the clock, patients can be admitted at any point in time. The hospital relied heavily on telephone, email or fax coordination with different departments to ensure that patients are assigned the correct beds.

Bed information gathered was consolidated on paper, which was used by the night manager to verify bed status when performing the hospital round from room to room.

Recognizing that MAH was faced with these challenges, Y3 Technologies, a Red Hat Alliance Partner, proposed an open source Bed Efficiency and Management (BEAM) system which would allow the hospital to better manage admissions, and track bed usage with the use of wireless and mobile technologies. BEAM should provide visibility on the hospital’s bed capacity, bed demand forecast and status of pending discharges for resource planning.

While other vendors also proposed solutions for MAH, the hospital chose Y3 Technologies’ BEAM solution for its rich interface architecture and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) enabled framework based on Red Hat and Oracle technologies.

BEAM was evaluated on the following criteria: ease of integration with existing IT infrastructure and resources, reliability, performance and availability of technology, cost-effectiveness, and vendor independence. In addition, MAH wanted a provider that had experience in implementing the proposed solution in a hospital.

“Open source is known to be cost effective and we are finding value as the technology is now stable, mature and of low risk to us. Furthermore, open source is well supported by major vendors such as IBM and Oracle, thus the time is right for Mount Alvernia to embark on this journey to use the technology to improve and enhance the current operations,” explained Fong Yong Choi, MIS Manager at MAH, on why he chose to adopt open source and Red Hat.

SOLUTION
The solution comprised Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle databases, and Java Platform Enterprise Edition 2, running on a virtualized IBM PowerSeries 2 P6-570 server. Red Hat Enterprise Linux sits on top of the enterprise backup software, with the systems management server as gateway. JBoss Enterprise Application Platform supports the hospital’s mission-critical applications, one of which is BEAM. JBoss Hibernate forms part of the object relational mapping (ORM) for the application framework.

BEAM was implemented in all wards that run 24 hours a day, and other departments such as front office, admission, housekeeping, nurse, and nurse wards.

With the successful deployment of BEAM, MAH plans to explore the feasibility and benefits of extending the open source platform to other systems within the hospital.

“We are more than satisfied with the overall performance of the system and the underlying system software running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss Enterprise Application Platform. From the solution point of view, we are happy that it has achieved the objectives that were set up. Our expectations have been met with outcome of the project” said Yong Choi.

The collaborative project among MAH, Y3 and Red Hat has broken new grounds in terms of information technology strategy and business operation.

BENEFITS
Following its successful deployment, BEAM has brought about many unforeseen benefits.

Employee productivity has increased as a result of an online, electronic whiteboard that minimizes bed location confusion.

As the system proactively notifies the housekeeping department on pending discharges and discharges for the day through the use of mobile devices, dependence on the nursing department is reduced. The housekeeping department no longer has to perform room-to-room checks for vacated beds prior to cleaning.

MAH’s booking department has also benefitted as bed status is available in real-time. Booking staff can now make more informed decisions and quickly locate and assign available beds for urgent admissions. These assignments can be made any time and at any location using wireless mobile devices.

The MAH management team is also positioned to make better decisions, as key performance indicators are readily available from the management dashboard. These indicators include cutting bed turnaround time to less than 30 minutes, and quality monitoring of housekeeping now achieves excellent or good rating. It used to take around 40 minutes to turn a bed around.

By creating a paperless environment, BEAM has enabled the hospital to support the green environment campaign.

“The key to the success of the project is knowledge sharing and strong management support. Given that MAH has the healthcare domain, Y3 and Red Hat provided the needed technology and solution to be able to meet the business objective,” said Jocelyn Austria, bed management system project manager, Y3 Technologies.

“MAH has shown its pioneering spirit by embarking on this project. It is truly a leader in the field of healthcare and has shown technology proficiency as it has used a unique solution to improve its operations and services,” said James Loo Wai Kheong, COO, Y3 Technologies.

Companies: Advent Conferencing and CITYTECH

Industry: Conferencing/ Services/Technology

Geography: Chicago

Business Challenge: Needed to differentiate itself from the competition in a commodity marketplace.

Software: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform Including: JBoss Seam Framework, JBoss Messaging and JBoss Cache, JBoss jBPM Framework

Benefits: Increased sales by offering a more flexible and customized service; Boosted customer satisfaction by improving provisioning and billing procedures; streamlined internal processes and cut operational costs through integrating customer relationship management, business process management, and accounting systems.

“With an award-winning organization like Red Hat behind us, and world-class technology like JBoss to leverage for our solutions, we are primed for success,” said Matt Van Bergan, chief technology officer, CITYTECH.

“CITYTECH listens to my needs, and is very creative about coming back with ideas, they speak in terms that make me confident they understand my business, and are completely focused on making Advent successful.” – Mike Swimelar, president, Advent Conferencing

See CITYTECH in the Press: Enterprise Management Quarterly

Download the case study [PDF]

BACKGROUND
As a full-service telephone and Web conferencing service provider, Advent Conferencing offers the latest in secure collaboration technology for businesses of all sizes. It prides itself on being on the technological edge, and delivers the best sound quality and broadest range of features in the industry at competitive rates. Based in Chicago, Advent has a customer base that reaches throughout the United States, and has managed to differentiate itself in a crowded commodity marketplace through a savvy combination of the latest technologies and stellar customer service.

CITYTECH is a Chicago-based consultancy specializing in the design, development, and execution of highly available and scalable enterprise applications. A Red Hat partner, it specializes in JBoss, Java Enterprise Edition (J2EE), and other top software development platforms. CITYTECH’s mission is to help its customers achieve their business goals through technology. Founded in 2003, and growing at a rate of 25 percent annually, CITYTECH’s success is due to its ability to execute projects using an agile but methodical implementation methodology deployed by small, highly experienced teams of professionals. It forges long-term partnerships with clients and makes customer satisfaction its No. 1 priority.

OPPORTUNITY
The teleconferencing business is increasingly a commodity business. Most market participants offer roughly the same services at roughly the same price points. Mike Swimelar, president of Advent Conferencing, understood that the only way to differentiate his company from the pack of competitors was through technological innovation. By 2006, he was already offering the very the latest in secure collaboration technologies with the best sound quality and richest feature set. Its audio conferencing network, bridges, and processes were the most reliable in the industry. But he was looking for even more of an edge. “I realized there was more we could do,” said Swimelar.

Specifically, Swimelar wanted to provide advanced account management services to his customers that would enable them to do such things as generate usage reports on the fly; track expenses by conference leader, project, or account; and specify when, how, and in what format they would be billed. He also wanted to streamline Advent’s own internal operations. At the time, senior management, sales, marketing, operations, and accounting functions were served by “stovepipe” information systems that fragmented business and operational data in a way that made it difficult to see the big picture.

Billing – the lifeblood of any business – was especially problematic. “We were getting data dumps from the bridge software that we had to manually massage,” said Swimelar. “It could take days, sometimes longer, to get customer billing out.” In addition to slowing down cash flow, there was no flexibility in tailoring the bills according to customers’ specifications. And customers were also demanding more advanced management features that would allow them to track which employees were using the conferencing system, when, and for how long, and give them easy access to other usage and billing metrics. “Our customers wanted more control and visibility into the service, but our existing systems weren’t capable of providing that,” said Swimelar.

SOLUTION
Swimelar had worked with CITYTECH’s chief technology officer, Matt Van Bergan, while at another company. He went to Van Bergan for help developing an integrated Web-based application that would simultaneously meet Advent’s internal and customer-facing requirements. CITYTECH used the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as the basis of a development and deployment platform for building an application the two firms dubbed “Advent Pulse.”

To accomplish this, CITYTECH used the JBoss Messaging functionality within the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform to provide asynchronous communication with the conferencing bridge hardware. The JBoss Seam Framework was the basis for the Web application, primarily due to its integrated AJAX functionality. JBoss jBPM was used to model and manage the human-driven business processes. Finally, the JCache support within the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform enhanced performance when communicating to the dedicated conference bridge hardware.

BENEFITS
Today, Advent Pulse provides customer relationship management (CRM), live interface with the conference bridges for billing data extraction, business intelligence, and sales commission management in one seamless application.

The benefits were immediate, and substantial. “We spend a lot less time struggling just getting data into a format for billing customers, and a lot more time on marketing and sales,” said Swimelar. Additionally, he said, Advent can provision new customers and fill orders much more swiftly and cost effectively, and provide customers with near-real-time access to usage metrics.

The net result? “Customer satisfaction is much higher, billing errors have been eliminated, and Swimelar is convinced that he’s making more sales as a direct result of the new system in place. “Because we’re able to deliver exactly what our customers need, and do it flexibly, quickly, and for a competitive rate, it has really made a difference in our revenues,” he said.

“CITYTECH listens to my needs, and is very creative about coming back with ideas. Rather than being so acronym-oriented that I don’t know what they are talking about, they speak in terms that make me confident they understand my business, and are completely focused on making me successful,” said Swimelar.

In turn, CITYTECH points back to Red Hat as the ideal technology partner. “With an award-winning organization like Red Hat behind us, and world-class technology like JBoss to leverage for our solutions, we are primed for success,” said Van Bergan. Plus, he said, the stellar enterprise support, and the direction laid out by its product roadmap have made JBoss the perfect choice of middleware for many of its clients.

Looking ahead, Advent plans to use CITYTECH’s help to keep innovating. “That’s what’s going to keep us ahead of the competition,” said Swimelar. He is currently engaged with CITYTECH’s consulting division to brainstorm how the JBoss Communications Platform – based upon the Mobicents open source project – can be used to migrate from a traditional bridge teleconferencing architecture to a more integrated solution that enables the next-generation of conferencing services. “As we get off the traditional telephone networks and more into IP [Internet Protocol], we’ll be able to implement new solutions that would allow us to integrate voice and Web conferencing even more,” said Swimelar. “We’re very excited about the possibilities.”