Mission Critical Outages

It was apparent that Edwards Lifesciences needed a reliable system to integrate all of its applications and systems. "As we were growing fast, we realized our current system was not going to sustain us. There was a need for an integration strategy and a reliable enterprise-grade tool," said Rajeev Bhardwaj, senior director of enterprise technology.

The Global Information Technology team wanted agility, scalability, and "dial-tone" reliability. "Those were the three real outcomes that we were going for, and we realized that we just could not achieve them by maintaining status quo in our IT organization."

An Integration Solution that Ensures Reliability

To exchange more than 300,000 messages a day, Edwards Lifesciences is using TIBCO technology to integrate over 30 business-critical applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS). "The TIBCO platform covers pretty much every critical business application—a product lifecycle management system, an ERP system, a manufacturing execution system. A lot of business-critical systems are integrated through TIBCO."

World-Class Operations

For Edwards Lifesciences, moving to the cloud was a strategic choice and the only way it could become a world class operation. "We chose Amazon Web Services as the cloud platform and TIBCO as global application integration platform."

First, the IT team decided that any new applications would be built on AWS, and no longer on-premises. "We realized very early on, trying to move applications surgically, picking and choosing non-critical systems and doing a dev here and then a test there, that it quickly becomes a science experiment that never goes anywhere. So we took a bold stance that everything is going to move, and to prove that, we started with the critical applications first.

"In 7 months, we moved 95% of all of our business apps, including TIBCO, to the AWS cloud."

Integrated, Communicating Business Applications

Edwards Lifesciences started by deploying the TIBCO platform on AWS, and the very next one was the ERP application. The company experienced no major incidents with the TIBCO platform in 2018.

"In 13 or 14 months, we had more integrations on TIBCO BusinessWorks™ than the last 10 years combined. You can imagine a whole bunch of applications suddenly talking to each other. Amazing."

Scalability, Agility, Faster Integrations

Another advantage of the new platform is dial-tone reliability, and the ability to scale so that when a new project comes in or a company is acquired, it is very easy to integrate disparate IT systems.

"We're on a pretty aggressive journey to get to a place where we're competing with born-in-the-cloud type companies. Integration is no longer an afterthought. Now everyone thinks about integrating applications right from the get-go. When someone thinks of a capability that we need to have, the first question is how will it pull data from other applications or publish data. What's the source of truth for the data, how are these things coming together?

"We now feel confident taking on even bigger challenges and our business function leaders also feel confident that our information technology department can really rise to any challenge."