Hawaii's Largest Healthcare Streamlines Business Processes and Improves Customer Response Times with Service-Oriented Architecture — Turns to NEON Systems and Web Services for Increased Mainframe Interoperability with .NET

Business Wire, July 11, 2005

SUGAR LAND, Texas -- NEON Systems' Shadow(R) z/Services Accelerates Mainframe Development To Enable Rapid Re-purposing of Existing IMS Transactions as Reusable Web Services

NEON(R) Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq:NEON), The Mainframe Integration Experts, today announced the successful implementation of Shadow z/Services at the Hawaii Medical Service Association (HMSA), the state's largest provider of healthcare coverage, with more than 640,000 members. NEON's Shadow z/Services has been deployed as a means to re-purpose HMSA's core mainframe transactions into easy-to-deploy Web services, allowing them to improve customer response times by 200 hundred percent and dramatically improved service levels to service providers.

One of the most critical systems used by HMSA is a mainframe based claims application based on IBM's Information Management System (IMS), which is accessed by a variety of user groups. One such user group consists of internal processors who manage membership enrollment at HMSA -- a member of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association. HMSA had already built a new ASP.NET front-end for the application, which resided on Windows Server 2003. In order to truly streamline their data entry business process, HMSA needed real-time interoperability with the mainframe based IMS transactions.

Shadow z/Services seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, allowing HMSA developers to quickly map and record the necessary IMS transactions, expose these transactions as reusable Web services, and deploy the new Web services within a .NET application development framework. Now, when a user accesses the new ASP.NET interface, the system calls the Web service, which in turn connects with Shadow z/Services' runtime which invokes the correct sequence of IMS transactions to retrieve the needed information.

HMSA deployed the new integrated solution to its users with impressive results. With the old system, a typical user had to access several subsystems of the mainframe claims application in order to complete a typical enrollment. With Web services now providing the underlying interoperability, users now have a consolidated, single view that links back to multiple, disparate mainframe transactions. With this new consolidated graphical front-end, coupled with Shadow z/Services real-time access to the mainframe IMS subsystem, enrollment times have been dramatically reduced -- from upwards of fifteen minutes, to a more reasonable five minutes to complete the process.

"Better developer productivity, streamlined IT operations, and a flexible, yet robust service-oriented architecture means reduced costs for our organization," said Gordon Hilton, CIO of HMSA. "More importantly, it translates directly into significant business value. NEON's Shadow z/Services has given us more infrastructure agility to enable us to more quickly respond to changing business needs and ultimately provide a higher level of service to our customers and provider organizations."

"SOA is now the preferred infrastructure model to underpin improvements in an organization's business processes by allowing existing applications to be easily orchestrated into high value business services," said Mark Cresswell, president and CEO, NEON Systems. "Through their deployment of Shadow z/Services, HMSA is now able to exploit the benefits of Web services and SOA for accelerated application development, lower costs and the ability to more rapidly deliver value to end-users of the technology."

With the success of its initial mainframe Web services deployments, HMSA has embarked on several projects revolving around the same mainframe-based IMS claims application. Additionally, HMSA is preparing to launch a new health plan that will necessitate access to the identical information as the claims application. Through the use of Shadow z/Services, HMSA's programmers need only to identify the mainframe transactions on the existing claims applications and publish them as a Web service in order to support the new health plan application.

About Shadow RTE

NEON's Shadow RTE technology provides a robust technical architecture to support the broad range of customer requirements for mainframe integration. Shadow RTE is the foundation upon which customers can integrate mission critical mainframe resources into a Real-time Enterprise. A single unified platform, Shadow RTE enables real-time mainframe integration with industry standard application development platforms - .NET and/or J2EE - in support of Web services for Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), real-time events for Event-Driven Architectures (EDA), SQL for direct data access and transactional (XA) support, and Presentation integration for Web-enablement of legacy screen-based applications and data. Shadow RTE provides the auditing, tracing and logging layer required to meet new compliance reporting. With Shadow RTE, customers have a mainframe integration infrastructure that at its lower levels is designed and proven to be secure, scalable, high performance, reliable and manageable.