Summary
Headquarters – Washington, DC
Industry – Government Agency
Employees – 50,000
Annual Budget – Multi-Billions
Client Profile
The client, a large government agency, is responsible for facilitating and managing U.S. international relations. The client operates in over 250 countries, while conducting business in 150 currencies. Serving over 50,000 employees, assisting U.S. businesses in the international marketplace, and keeping the public informed about U.S. foreign policy, makes the data and application integration demands for this client extreme.
Issues
- Point-to-point integrations and legacy middleware slowed process improvements
- Error-prone systems easily broke and disrupted the user experience
The Challenge
The client had to overcome the challenge of serving an expanding customer base in the face of reduced funding and high demand for cost savings and faster turnaround. The client needed to find a more efficient and effective method to meet customer demands for increasingly complex services that supported data voice and video, real-time situational awareness, and real-time self-service and configuration capabilities.
The technical environment, as it stood, would not allow this client to achieve these customer driven requirements. Poor process modeling and misaligned business and data flows meant that it took a long time to execute system integration flows using legacy integration solutions.
The client aimed to retire some of their outdated applications to improve and update the technical environment, but many point-to-point integrations had been built in. ArganoMS3 had to find a way to loosen legacy systems that were tightly coupled. To add complexity, every piece of data could live only on-premises, as this client’s network does not have external internet connectivity and does not allow for data storage in the cloud.
Outcome
- Streamline data retrieval and synchronize integrations to improve the customer experience
- Use clean and simple REST APIs, standard models, legacy system integrations and easy decoupling points to enable business agility
The Solution
ArganoMS3’s plan was to leverage modern technologies into the company’s infrastructure. ArganoMS3 implemented clean and simple REST APIs, standard data models, and easy decoupling points to integrate legacy system integrations with inherent business value. Since the client used four different communication protocols and planned to leverage standardized data models such as UBL, CIQ, MTOSI and OSS/J, the development team would need an ESB.
After considerable vetting of ESB products offered, ArganoMS3 decided on Mule ESB. Mule ESB offered a development suite that was intuitive for a legacy based development team to pick up, and a platform approach that would enable him to scale with future agency’s needs.
With Mule ESB and Anypoint Platform, the client could eliminate the current Message Oriented Middleware (MoM), which facilitated the integration between the CRM System, network modeling system and generated tickets within the Service Management System. The original effort to create the 14 different integrations took nearly 26 months to have a production ready system that could handle the communication between the various systems. The ArganoMS3 team was able to rebuild these flows using Anypoint Studio’s graphical design environment in only 6 months. The development team automated critical business processes for the Operations group, eliminating manual steps and reducing process times from hours to minutes, for a 90 percent time savings.
Benefits
- 35 times more productive, creating 55 new flows a month with the same team that used to produce 2 flows a month
- Significant cost savings by replacing several systems
The Results
Using MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform has generated significant cost savings for the client. They have retired a number of their major systems and tools, and reduced their staffing needs by 2 Full Time Equivalents (FTE). The client can now rely on Anypoint Platform for all of their integration needs internally, as well as when they integrate with other companies.
Since the client’s implementation of Mule ESB, the development team has been extremely productive. Moving forward, the client plans to build out more event-driven data enrichment capabilities by leveraging the platform to orchestrate the integrations for a multi-vendor Order Management system.
The first major release of the client’s top priority IT project was launched in half the time that was originally estimated and one-fourth of the time that was spent implementing its predecessor system. The client has integrated multiple systems giving them the ability to better serve their customers with a modern, agile SOA platform.
