Sapient Health Network Delivers Personalized Health Information Using BEA WebLogic Application Server

Business Wire, Oct 26, 1998

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 26, 1998--

BEA WebLogic Application Server Chosen to Deliver Dynamic On-line

Health Information Application Serving 130,000 Users

BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:BEAS) today announced that Sapient Health Network (SHN), a free on-line health information and support community, has successfully re-launched its Web site using the BEA WebLogic application server. More than 130,000 people access SHN's site, which provides a sophisticated blend of customized health information and support to members of condition-specific on-line communities. With the BEA WebLogic application server, SHN is able to personalize the delivery of increasing volumes of high-quality health information for thousands of simultaneous users.

SHN provides a variety of customized, Web-based information and support for patients with serious and chronic illnesses who belong to one of its 17 separate topic communities. SHN's customized technology allows members to personalize the information they receive from a rich variety of reliable sources including Reuters medical news, Merriam-Webster Medical dictionaries, clinical trial notices, and medical advisors. Members complete an extensive personal profile and then receive the most current information personalized to match their condition and stage of disease. SHN is using the BEA WebLogic application server to link each member's interests based on their profile and choice of reading materials to numerous proprietary databases and file systems that serve up multiple sources of data.

"With the BEA WebLogic application server as a key component of our solution, SHN's system will be able to support rapid and sustainable growth," commented Kristopher Nybakken, vice president of technology for SHN. "We hit the wall with our previous server solution and wanted to streamline operational and maintenance expenses for the site. We also ran into scaling issues to meet future demand as the SHN membership database grew. The BEA WebLogic application server was the only solution that met our performance and manageability requirements."

"The issues SHN was facing are becoming all too common for successful, high-traffic Web sites," said Paul Ambrose, chief technology officer of BEA's WebXpress division. "Our Web application server was able to quickly solve many of the most critical issues the company faced -- including performance and ability to scale to meet the load generated by 130,000 users. The BEA WebLogic application server has provided an effective means of managing the complexity that is a natural outcome of such dynamic, personalized sites."

The BEA WebLogic application server enabled SHN to focus on the business logic of the application as opposed to spending time building their infrastructure, helping SHN cut their development time by three to six months. In addition, SHN was able to distribute their business logic, enabling users to connect with a variety of data sources, including multiple databases and live data feeds. Locating business logic on the server-side, a fundamental of the BEA WebLogic application server architecture, also greatly increased SHN's ability to scale their applications while ensuring the reliability and security of the information offered.

The new site, deployed on the Sun Solaris 2.6 platform and connecting to an IBM DB2 database, makes extensive use of Java Servlets, as well as the BEA WebLogic application server's Secure Socket Layer (SSL) capabilities and connection pooling feature, which enables the smooth management of a variety of application parameters. The application server accesses information on the database via the standard JDBC drivers. As the SHN site continues to evolve, the BEA WebLogic application server is important because it enables the company to reuse Java components and helps ensure new applications can interoperate seamlessly with the existing environment.

SHN, Inc.

Headquartered in Portland, Ore., SHN (Sapient Health Network, Inc.) -- http://www.shn.net -- is a free, Web-based health information and support service for people with chronic and serious illnesses, as well as their family and friends. SHN creates condition-specific online communities that enable its more than 100,000 members to access personalized information about their conditions and participate in interactive support networks via the Web. Healthcare companies turn to SHN to gain insights into patient perspectives through population studies and aggregate-level market research. Through this activity, SHN helps instill the patient perspective in the product development, marketing and delivery systems of its customers. SHN assures that individual data, or information that can be used to identify an individual, will never be disclosed to any third party without that individual's express written consent.

BEA Systems, Inc.

BEA Systems, Inc., is a leading provider of cross-platform middleware solutions for enterprise applications. BEA's products and services enable mission-critical, distributed applications to work seamlessly in client/server, Internet, and legacy environments. BEA provides transactional, messaging, and distributed object-based software, as well as an industry-leading Java Web application server, for developing and deploying these enterprise applications. The BEA WebLogic application server, developed and supported by BEA's WebXpress division, offers the critical front-end Web component to BEA's end-to-end enterprise middleware solution. In addition to its broad software product line, BEA provides complete solutions to its customers through its extensive partner network, and a full range of services including consulting, training, and support. BEA is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and has 50 offices in 24 countries around the globe. The company's common stock trades on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol "BEAS." Additional information on BEA is available on the Internet at http://www.beasys.com.