1 March 2006

Premera Blue Cross has created a business intelligence (BI) solution using Intel Itanium 2 and Xeon processor-based Unisys ES7000 servers running Microsoft Windows and SQL Server 2000. Premera's new infrastructure delivers the high performance and scalability necessary to meet the tough demands of BI activities with an economical cost model from the industry-standard Microsoft Windows environment.

Given the challenge of responding to double-digit increases in healthcare costs while delivering on commitments to members and healthcare providers, information is a vital resource to health insurers. Transactional applications, such as claims processing, can be viewed as the heartbeat of these organisations. Of equal importance is business intelligence ? the eyes and ears of the organisation, according to Alan Smit, senior vice president and CIO at Premera Blue Cross. Recognising trends early through BI allows Premera to make important decisions while still providing cost-effective products to its members.

Premera Blue Cross is a non-profit, independent regional health plan providing members, employers, providers and brokers with high-quality coverage and service. The company serves approximately 1.5m members through a network of nearly 19,000 health care professionals and 123 hospitals.

The cost of the insurer's existing BI infrastructure was growing and finding skilled developers was difficult. Bob Crownhart, director of infrastructure support, explains: "We had multiple 'computing islands' for BI whose cost was out of proportion with the value they delivered. We wanted to drive those costs down by standardising on the Windows environment."

Jon Wilson, director of analytical and financial applications, adds: "Our existing infrastructure was approaching its performance limits. We also wanted a fully functional test and development environment and access to better tools and a greater variety of pre-developed applications."

Premera selected an Intel Itanium 2 processor-based Unisys ES7000 server running Microsoft Windows Server 2003, Datacenter Edition and SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) as its data warehouse platform. Two additional Intel Xeon processor-based ES7000 servers running Windows 2000 Datacenter Server and SQL Server 2000 support query and reporting activities. The solution offers the BI performance Premera needs in a cost-effective Windows environment. New EMC Clariion CX600 disk storage and StorageTek L700 tape drives increase storage capacity and enhance business continuity.

In addition, Smit and his team saw Unisys' depth of experience with large-scale Windows environments and BI as a plus. Wilson says: "Unisys helped us validate Windows and SQL for BI, develop the business case, configure the system for production, and structure our data for performance."

The migration of Premera's UDB and DB2 databases to SQL Server 2000 (64-bit) has gone smoothly. The insurer has 3.5 terabytes of production data which is growing at five per cent per month. It loads a total of 200m rows per month into its dimensional data warehouse, which currently has 600 gigabytes of permanent storage and 300 gigabytes of temporary space to support query execution. Updated both weekly and monthly, the data warehouse supports queries from 135 users using Cognos and IBI WebFocus software tools. In addition, over 250 business users access standard Web-based reports. The number of users is expected to grow by 10 per cent in 2004 and 20 per cent in 2005. Premera's 20-plus developers use a separate development and test environment established on one of the partitions of its ES7000 server.

The solution provides important technical benefits. Performance is dramatically improved ? one month-end financial process runs in less than six hours on the Intel Itanium 2 processor-based ES7000 server, compared to four days in the old environment. Jon Wilson says: "We're seeing lots of queries and several extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes run in significantly less time than required in our previous infrastructure."

In addition, the new environment offers improved productivity for both developers and business users, from better BI tools and reductions in query and ETL times of nearly 50 per cent. Premera has also gained greater access to skilled personnel resources, another benefit of the Windows environment. Furthermore, IT job satisfaction has increased from the opportunity to work with contemporary technologies instead of a Cobol-based environment.

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