How Alight Solutions (Aon Hewitt) Improved Customer Experience by over 250x with Mainframe Offload and Single View

Mat Keep
July 20, 2017 | Updated: July 24, 2017
#Customer Stories

Fortune 500 companies are increasingly seeking ways to innovate in customer experience, while reducing reliance on legacy technologies. Alight Solutions, formerly part of Aon PLC, was attempting to integrate customer data stored in multiple source systems hosted on its zOS mainframe and in cloud services, while at the same time improving developer productivity, and reducing costs.

Alight’s solution was to build a customer 360 single view platform using MongoDB and Apache Kafka, and was presented by Christopher Roberts, the company’s VP of Enterprise Architecture, during this year’s MongoDB World ‘17 conference. You can view a recording of “Aon: Taking Big Iron to Ludicrous Speed” along with Christopher’s slides at the MongoDB World ‘17 site.

Alight Solutions is the leading provider of outsourced benefits administration, cloud-based HR and financial solutions, serving close to 40 million employees from over 1,400 organizations, including nearly 50% of the Fortune 500.

To meet the demands of the business, the architecture team was tasked with building a cross-platform single customer view to unlock greater data insights and improve application responsiveness, while also reducing mainframe costs. Retrieving customer data from frontend consumer interfaces such as Salesforce, the UPOINT HR portal, and mobile apps meant accessing multiple backend source systems running on a mainframe platform and Workday. Each request added to the ongoing mainframe MIPS costs, and scaling multiple systems to support customer growth was proving difficult. Query latency was typically 0.5 of a second, which negatively impacted customer experience.

As the project was scoped, consideration was given to copying all customer data into Alight’s existing Hadoop system, and serving the single view from there. However, Hadoop didn’t offer the OLTP or low latency demands of the app, so the business needed an alternative approach.

After researching multiple options, the Alight team decided MongoDB was the best choice for its single view database. With its flexible document data model, MongoDB offered the schema flexibility needed to accommodate multi-structured, polymorphic customer data from the source systems. Its expressive query language and secondary indexes enabled business users to access customer data in whichever way they needed. MongoDB’s distributed, self-healing architecture enabled Alight to operationalize the single view, ensuring high scalability and always-on availability with minimal overhead to the ops team.

Application performance was a key driver for the project, and MongoDB delivered. With customer data aggregated into a single document, query latency was reduced from 500 milliseconds to less than 2 milliseconds – a 250x improvement!

Delivering the Single View on MongoDB

In his session, Christopher walked through the three phases of the project, from the initial phase delivering a working solution in less than six months, through to the current phase that provides more granular insights into each customer’s benefit classes. He shared tips and patterns for providing low latency solutions that can be leveraged effectively on legacy mainframe and modern cloud platforms.

In phase 1, data was extracted from the mainframe in batches, transformed in Hadoop, and then loaded into MongoDB. Phase 1 was a vital first step in demonstrating the possibilities of building a single view, but Hadoop’s fragility and reliance on multiple independent technologies complicated the data transform process. In addition, change data capture was slow, and the data merging and matching rules were too simplistic, affecting data quality.

Phase 2: Real time and batch data pipeline to create single view with Kafka & MongoDB. (Image courtesy of Alight Solution MongoDB World presentation)

In phase 2, Alight replaced Hadoop with Kafka, enabling modifications to source data to be sent as messages in both batches and in real time streams. Data could then be merged through the application of more sophisticated Master Data Management (MDM) rules, before being loaded into MongoDB, where it was exposed to consuming systems via a REST API.

In its current third phase, Alight engineers are redesigning their data structures to model customer data by benefit class, enabling greater deployment flexibility for scalability and high availability. Data versioning is also being added to track changes to each customer record over time.

Phase 3: Data remodeling and versioning. (Image courtesy of Alight Solution MongoDB World presentation)

Christopher wrapped up his session by talking through the benefits the single view project has delivered to the business:

  • Customer experience: faster responsiveness, and ease in delivering new functionality
  • Lower costs: fewer calls to the mainframe, and reductions in peak consumption
  • Unlocked innovation: greater insight into customer data, and improved agility in delivering new services

To learn more, take a look at the slides and recording.

To get started in customer experience innovation, download our 10-Step Methodology to Building a Single View of Your Business whitepaper.

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MongoDB Recognized on 2017 Forbes Cloud 100 List

The Forbes Cloud 100 list is only in its second year, but it’s already established itself as one of the most prestigious media markers for success in the cloud computing world. It’s fitting that just one year after MongoDB Atlas was introduced to the market, technically qualifying MongoDB for consideration, the company debuted on the 2017 Forbes Cloud 100 list at No. 40. The Forbes Cloud 100 recognizes the best and brightest of privately-held “cloud companies.” The list is compiled by a combination of Forbes editorial staff, Cloud 100 partners at Bessemer Venture Partners and Salesforce Ventures, and CEOs from 25 publically-traded cloud companies. The recognition marks a good time to reflect on the success of MongoDB Atlas over the course of the last 12 months. The majority of MongoDB deployments are already in the cloud--public and private--and it made perfect sense to start offering MongoDB as a service for customers that don’t want any of the operational overhead that comes with running your own database. Instead, we manage it all for them. From massive opportunity for disruption, to the go-to-market-strategy and leveraging feedback from our community of users, we have been able to extend MongoDB, which was born in the cloud, into a major cloud provider. Sahir Azam is the Vice President of Cloud Products and GTM at MongoDB. Sahir joined MongoDB in May of 2016, just in time for Atlas to be officially launched in June at MongoDB World. Earlier this week I was able to sit down with him to discuss the notability of the Forbes recognition, the success of Atlas and the future of MongoDB in the cloud. He was earnestly proud to see MongoDB listed, “I’m honored to see MongoDB on the Forbes Cloud 100 list. Especially given that we’ve recently extended our offerings into fully managed cloud services heavily in the last year. It’s an important recognition to the early traction we’ve had in the market. The Forbes Cloud 100 seems to be an Enterprise centric list. Forbes has reinforced that cloud has entered the mainstream of modern Enterprise, and it is evident by the companies listed.” Sahir recalled the energy around the MongoDB Atlas launch:. “Launch week was amazing. I was completely new to the company and I had never before felt the size and scope of a community like the one around MongoDB. Within a matter of days there were hundreds of users coming onto the platform. It was exciting to see how much pent up demand there was over time.” While infrastructure as a service has already seen massive adoption, now users are going up the stack--consuming applications and databases as a service. Many see it as the future of the database industry. Redmond analyst Stephen O’Grady noted when Atlas was announced : “Of all of the various services offered by cloud providers, databases are among the most sticky. This is in part due to the inherent inertia that comes with large datasets that pose logistical challenges simply to move from one place to another, but also to the risks of changing production database infrastructure.” When first released, MongoDB Atlas was based on an elastic pricing model that was metered on hourly usage. It was available only on Amazon Web Services in a limited regions. Over the last year a few key decisions were made which doubles down on the fact that MongoDB is a platform based on customer choice. Sahir explained: “One big thing that we heard from customers globally was that they wanted Atlas available in more regions. We were able to go from 5 regions to 14 on AWS in the first year. At MongoDB World this year, we announced the expansion of Atlas to all major cloud platforms , including Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. We’ve also introduced a live migration utility, which allows customers to import existing clusters into Atlas to reduce migration time. In the spring we launched a free tier of Atlas which allows anyone to evaluate if Atlas is the right choice to them, at no cost. As you can imagine, both these offerings have been incredibly well received.” The Cloud Team at MongoDB is more than triple the size than it was when it launched Atlas, and every function within MongoDB is expanding with a cloud focus as we continue to scale. Our engineers always strive to build the innovative features our customers and users request as a way to empower developers to deliver apps faster and deliver on our vision. They are working with some of the newest cloud technologies in the market to help continue to build out Atlas globally. The recently announced beta launch of the company’s newest cloud offering, the backend as a service MongoDB Stitch , at MongoDB World is a perfect example. Stitch provides developers with a simple way to handle the routine--but complex and time consuming--backend plumbing including working with data, controlling data access and orchestrating commonly used services like payments or messaging. One of the main benefits of Stitch is that it frees up developer productivity to focus on the things that really matter when building an app experience that people love. While we’re excited to see what users will do with Stitch as it matures in beta, we’ve already seen some incredible Atlas results through our customers. Biotechnology giant Thermo Fisher has leveraged MongoDB Atlas to reduce experiment times for 10K unique customers. Housing over 1.3 million experiments, it is one of the largest cloud platforms for the scientific community. “They are an established global scientific company, and a classic enterprise. It’s a really cool use case that allows scientists to have access to analytical data through the cloud using any Thermo Fisher cloud device.” So what can we expect for the future of MongoDB Atlas? According to Sahir, “As cloud accelerates, MongoDB Atlas will be a key platform in delivering applications. The vision is to have a global database that is intelligent and self optimizing.” And what about for MongoDB? “There is so much opportunity here, from cool emerging tech, solving real problems, and rapid career trajectory.” Interested in learning more about MongoDB Atlas? Try it for free . Want to learn more about opportunities at MongoDB? Click here .

July 19, 2017
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Data and the European Landscape: 3 Trends for 2022

The past two years have brought massive changes for IT leaders: large and complex cloud migrations; unprecedented numbers of people suddenly working, shopping and learning from home; and a burst in demand for digital-first experiences. Like everyone else, we are hoping that 2022 isn’t so disruptive (fingers crossed!), our customer conversations in Europe do lead us to believe the new year will bring new business priorities. We’re already noticing changes in conversations around vendor lock-in, thanks to the Digital Markets Act, a new enthusiasm for combining operational and analytical data to drive new insights faster, and a more strategic embrace of sustainability. Here’s how we see these trends playing out in 2022. Digital markets act draws new attention to cloud vendor lock-in in Europe We’ve heard plenty about the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act , which, in the name of ensuring fair and open digital markets, would place new restrictions on companies that are deemed to be digital “gatekeepers” in the region. That discussion will be nothing compared to the vigorous debate we expect once the EU begins the very tricky political business of determining exactly which companies will fall under the act. If the EU sets the bar for revenues, users, and market size high enough, it’s possible that the regulation will end up affecting only Facebook, Amazon, Google, Apple, and Microsoft. But a European group representing 2,500 CIOs and almost 700 organizations is now pushing to have the regulation encompass more software companies. Their main concern centers around “distorted competition” in cloud infrastructure services and a worry that companies are being locked into one cloud vendor. A trend that will likely increase in 2022 that pushes back on cloud vendor lock-in is embracing multi-cloud strategies. We should expect to see more organisations in the region pursuing multi-cloud environments as a means to improve business continuity and agility whilst being able to access best of breed services from each cloud provider. As we have always said …”it’s fine to date your cloud provider….but don’t ever marry them.” The convergence of operational and analytical data The processing of operational and analytical data is almost always contained in different data systems, each tuned to that use case and managed by separate teams. But because that data lives in separate places, it’s almost impossible for organisations to generate insights and automate actions in real time, against live data. We believe 2022 is the year we’ll see a critical mass of companies in the region make significant progress toward a convergence of their operational and analytical data. We’re already starting to see some of the principles of microservices in operational applications, such as domain ownership, be applied to analytics as well. We’re hearing about this from so many of our customers locally, who are looking at MongoDB as an application data platform that allows them to perform queries across both real-time and historical data, using a unified platform and a single query API. This results in the applications they are building becoming more intelligent and contextual to their users, while avoiding dependencies on centralized analytics teams that otherwise slow down how quickly new, data-driven experiences can be released. Sustainability drives local strategic IT choice Technology always has some environmental cost. Sometimes that’s obvious — such as the energy needs and emissions associated with Bitcoin mining. More often, though, the environmental costs are well hidden. The European Green Deal commits the European Union to reducing emissions by 55% by 2030, with a focus on sustainable industry. With the U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP26) recently completed in Glasgow, and coming off the hottest European summer on record, climate issues have become top of mind. That means our customers are increasingly looking to make their technical operations more sustainable — including in their choice of cloud provider and data centers. According to research from IDC , more than 20% of CxOs say that sustainability is now important in selecting a strategic cloud service provider, and some 29% of CxOs are including sustainability into their RFPs for cloud services. Most interesting, 26% say they are willing to switch to providers with better sustainability credentials. Historically, it’s been difficult to make a switch like that. That’s part of the reason we built MongoDB Atlas — to give our customers the flexibility to run in any region , with any of the three largest cloud providers, and to make it easy to switch between them, and even to run a single database cluster across them. Publicly available information about the footprint of individual regions and even single data centers will make it simpler for companies to make informed decisions. Already, at least one cloud platform has added indicators to regions with the lowest carbon footprint. Source: IDC, European Customers Engage Services Providers at All Stages of Their Cloud Journey, IDC Survey Spotlight, Doc #EUR248484021, Dec 2021

December 21, 2021