Discovery Partner Market’s Vitality wellness platform, used by insurance carriers around the world, aims to improve the health of policyholders and reward them when they meet their goals. Neil Adamson, CIO, explains the challenge: “Being both a rewards and a health platform, we needed to integrate with insurance companies as well as with numerous rewards and health partners. Going into six or seven countries in a region, the integration requirements were intense, costly, and very time consuming.

“Our partners expected a pluggable, repeatable model, but what was not considered was localization for each country. If integrations didn’t work, were overly complex, or didn’t provide a streamlined experience, it would affect membership and use. If we are perceived to be costly and time consuming, it opens the door for competition.

“The aspiration was to have a common, standardized, secure, global integration that gives clients the ability to call back-end services from multiple locations.”

“The TIBCO relationship with Discovery preceded Vitality and Discovery Partner Markets. TIBCO had proven itself, it was the standard, and the technologies were well understood. Discovery’s view was that we should use existing standards unless we found they were not suitable. We looked at a couple of other technologies that we believed could compete against TIBCO. During our investigations, TIBCO proved itself. We also realized that you can’t implement a new technology without a good level of trust and the right skills. Coupled with the performance results, this really made TIBCO the winner. We asked them to assist with the design, audit, and sign off of the architecture design. That additional verification gave us a lot more peace of mind than had we just done it ourselves. They were very helpful.

“We had to address regionalization and customization of end user websites and mobile apps in the local language. We decoupled a lot of our components through our service layer, the ESB—TIBCO BusinessWorks™ and TIBCO® Enterprise Message Service. It allowed us to expose services to the front end and easily configure apps and websites. We use TIBCO Spotfire® for monitoring and management of queues and operations.”

Reduced Time, Cost, and Effort
“Standardizing our integration approaches has reduced duplication of effort, coding, testing, et cetera, by about 80 to 90%. One cloud instance sends and receives information for every Vitality instance. We implement once for each region, and that gives us access to the required data.

“In each country we have to work with typically 10 to 18 rewards partners,” says Adamson. “Now, with standard services, we have a solution that fits all requirements and reduces this work, probably by as much as 80% because it has already been implemented in the ESB.

Internet of Things Performance
“We collect huge amounts of data all day every day from users across the world in real time, including from any number of wearable devices. It has been one of the reasons for becoming more real-time and personalized. We’ve released the Active Reward solution in partnership with Apple. Members get a free Apple watch, and if you meet your weekly exercise goals, your monthly watch installments are covered by Vitality. If you fail to meet your goals, you pay the installment. It’s a very strong incentive for exercising, but requires real-time data collection. If you’re collecting multiple device states globally, you need to ensure that these events are captured and are not going to be lost, that you have guaranteed delivery. TIBCO messaging with queuing mechanisms and asynchronous delivery was one of our requirements,” says Adamson.

Maximum Service, Security, Reliability
“Because we basically became a vendor to life insurance companies, they expect that what we have is going to provide security, reliability, performance, as well as business functionality,” says Adamson. “TIBCO is not only assisting us internally but also providing us with enterprise strength so we can interface with these large insurance companies. TIBCO has enabled us to offer maximum service to our partners. We shield them from the technology implementation, and just give them a very well-defined set of services that they can call without having to worry about the underlying technology.”

“A lot of the focus is moving to security to ensure our systems more than satisfy the criteria. We also want to make Vitality more mobile engaging. We want to become more cloud-based and move into a very strong microservices environment, and we’ve been engaging with TIBCO around its API manager product. We also have a lot of interest in TIBCO’s complex event processing system.”