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Improving the IT/business dynamic

Priority Health’s Oracle® database platform supports mission-critical business applications. The environment consists of custom applications, financials, database processing and Web sites, making unwavering performance and continuous availability critical priorities.

“My goal is to maintain consistency for the organization, regardless of how growth impacts the infrastructure,” says Ed Kosten, Manager of Infrastructure Engineering at Priority Health. “It’s IT’s job to deliver the service levels that users expect and to achieve stellar application availability. Staying with HP and upgrading to the HP Integrity platform allowed us to do that.”

Blade benefits

The company delivers IT services out of its two primary data centers. In addition to improving the performance of the Oracle database, integrating blades into the data center helped Kosten:

“We know the move has been successful because of the lack of feedback from the user community,” says Kosten. “But going beyond that, adopting HP Integrity has facilitated continuity in our IT approach. We’re able to use technology consistently as a direct business enabler by being efficient and supporting the business in its aggressive progression.”

Single point of contact

Historically, the company has been a HP shop, relying on servers, storage, the HP-UX operating system, virtual machines and several other solutions to maximize its environment. Kosten highlights Priority Health’s solid history with HP and the advantages of having a single point of contact for IT hardware, services and support.

“When we were considering the replacement of our HP 9000 environment, staying with HP and upgrading to HP Integrity was a natural progression. It was very important to us to maintain the service we were used to, so we didn’t really look beyond HP for the solution,” says Kosten.

Technology supporting the business

The new infrastructure is helping to change the dynamics between IT and the business it serves. In the past, most initiatives were driven out of IT, with little input and understanding from the business. Now the business is beginning to see the value that IT delivers and how technology can further support the business.

“We’re definitely moving away from a break/fix mentality toward being a true enabler of the business,” says Kosten. “With the new infrastructure, the business is seeing the value in enhanced performance, reliability and availability. So it gains confidence that we can support both organic and acquisition growth as the business expands its geographies, product portfolio and market penetration.”

Priority Health’s 2007 acquisition of Care Choices from Trinity Health is an excellent example. Care Choices had no IT essence of its own, so Priority Health had to absorb the fulfillment into its own infrastructure.

With no data, no history and no direct correlation to apply to the environment, there was little in the way of standards typically associated with capacity planning. So Priority Health’s infrastructure had to be ready for anything.

“To help the business transition smoothly from a technology perspective in instances such as the one we experienced with the acquisition of Trinity Health’s Care Choices, we need to be prepared. And our HP infrastructure gives us the confidence that we can handle anything the business throws at us,” says Kosten.

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