Large Government Agency

Leveraging powerful integration solutions to satisfy complex data and application demands

The client, a large government agency, is responsible for facilitating and managing U.S. international relations. The client operates in over 250 countries, while conducting business in 150 currencies. Serving over 50,000 employees, assisting U.S. businesses in the international marketplace, and keeping the public informed about U.S. foreign policy, made for complex data and application integration demands for this client.

1

The Challenge

The client had to overcome the challenge of serving an expanding customer base in the face of reduced funding and high demand for cost savings and faster turnaround. The client needed to find a more efficient and effective method to meet customer demands for increasingly complex services that supported data voice and video, real-time situational awareness, and real-time self-service and configuration capabilities.

The technical environment, as it stood, would not allow this client to achieve these customer-driven requirements. Poor process modeling and misaligned business and data flows meant that it took a long time to execute system integration flows using legacy integration solutions.

The client aimed to retire some of their outdated applications to improve and update the technical environment, but many point-to-point integrations had been built in. Argano had to find a way to loosen legacy systems that were tightly coupled. To add complexity, every piece of data could live only on-premises, as this client’s network does not have external internet connectivity and does not allow for data storage in the cloud.

2

The Solution

To satisfy the client’s complex demands, Argano implemented clean and simple REST APIs, standard data models, and easy decoupling points to integrate legacy system integrations with inherent business value. Since the client used four different communication protocols and planned to leverage standardized data models such as UBL, CIQ, MTOSI and OSS/J, the development team would need an ESB.

After considerable vetting of ESB products offered, the client decided on Mule ESB. Mule ESB offered a development suite that was intuitive for a legacy-based development team to pick up, and a platform approach that would enable the agency to scale to future needs.

With Mule ESB and Anypoint Platform, the client could eliminate the current Message Oriented Middleware (MoM), which facilitated the integration between the CRM system, network modeling system and generated tickets within the Service Management System. The original effort to create the 14 different integrations would typically take nearly 26 months to have a production-ready system that could handle the communication between the various systems. The Argano team was able to rebuild these flows using Anypoint Studio’s graphical design environment in only 6 months. With the new solution, the client was able to automate critical business processes for the Operations group, eliminating manual steps and reducing process times from hours to minutes, for a 90 percent time savings.

3

The Results

Using MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform has generated significant cost savings for the client. They have retired a number of major systems and tools, which reduced their staffing needs by two full-time positions. The client now relies on Anypoint Platform for all integration needs internally, as well as when they integrate with other organizations.

Since the client’s implementation of Mule ESB, the development team has been extremely productive. Moving forward, the client plans to build out more event-driven data enrichment capabilities by leveraging the platform to orchestrate the integrations for a multi-vendor order management system.

The first major release of the client’s top priority IT project was launched in half the time that was originally estimated and one-fourth of the time that was spent implementing its predecessor system. The client has integrated multiple systems giving them the ability to better serve their customers with a modern, agile SOA platform.