FFF Enterprises Increases Performance and Flexibility for Online Vaccine Purchasing Application
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- A10 ADC
- aFleX
- Imperva SecureSphere
Tech Stack
- Layer 4-7 server load balancing
- SSL acceleration/offload
- Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS)
- TCL programming language
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Customer Satisfaction
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Cybersecurity & Privacy - Application Security
Applicable Industries
- Healthcare & Hospitals
- Pharmaceuticals
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Remote Asset Management
- Cybersecurity
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- Cybersecurity Services
About The Customer
FFF Enterprises, founded in 1988, is a multidimensional healthcare company and the nation’s largest distributor of plasma products, vaccines, and other biopharmaceuticals. It serves over 80% of U.S. hospitals and supplies the nation’s leading non-acute care group purchasing organizations. MyFluVaccine™ (www.myfluvaccine.com), delivered by FFF Enterprises, is the nation’s first online vaccine portal, allowing vaccine providers to order a dedicated supply of vaccines for guaranteed delivery on the dates they choose. To run the MyFluVaccine™ portal, FFF Enterprises has a data center of Web servers that serve up the online vaccine purchasing application. Users from clinics, pharmacies, and hospitals leverage the MyFluVaccine™ portal regularly.
The Challenge
During the flu season, pharmacies, hospitals, and doctors’ offices increase activity on the MyFluVaccine™ portal, creating peak usage conditions. To prepare for the flu season peak, FFF Enterprises began evaluating Juniper’s DX line of server load balancers to ensure MyFluVaccine’s™ performance and availability to customers. However, shortly after the initial evaluation, Juniper announced it would end of life its DX family with a smooth transition for customers. FFF Enterprises concurrently read about A10 Networks® Application Delivery Controllers (ADC) in the news, highlighting recent independent third-party performance from the Tolly Group, which proved that A10 ADC delivers over double the performance at less than half the price of incumbents. As a result, FFF Enterprises chose to evaluate the A10 ADC, a next-generation server load balancer platform that has garnered numerous awards for its multi-core CPU architecture that is tuned for high volume web applications such as MyFluVaccine™.
The Solution
FFF Enterprises selected A10 ADCs’ Advanced Traffic Manager as it delivers all the required features to ensure the MyFluVaccine™ portal performs as desired, especially during peak usage conditions. The key A10 ADC features that FFF Enterprises leverages include Layer 4-7 server load balancing, SSL acceleration/offload, application persistence, and aFleX® for advanced scripting. With SSL acceleration/offload, CPU intensive encrypted traffic required for Web transactions is offloaded by the A10 ADC server load balancer. This reduces the number of servers required to support Web transactions, while at the same time increasing transaction speed so that more orders can be processed in the same amount of time. For MyFluVaccine™, the A10 ADC provides FFF Enterprises with application persistence to the same server across ports and domain names, ensuring a positive Web experience for customers placing orders in the portal. FFF Enterprises is leveraging the aFleX advanced scripting tool to customize policies to manipulate Layer 7 traffic, which can eliminate traffic bottlenecks during peak usage conditions. aFleX is based on the industry-standard TCL programming language and does not suffer from performance degradation when numerous features are turned on, due to A10 ADCs’ scalable Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS®) architecture that is tuned for multi-core CPUs. FFF Enterprises also deployed Imperva’s SecureSphere Web Application Firewall to secure Web applications and comply with PCI regulations. A10 Networks and Imperva partner to deliver the industry’s best-of-breed server load balancer and application firewall solution.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
Case Study missing?
Start adding your own!
Register with your work email and create a new case study profile for your business.
Related Case Studies.
Case Study
Case Study: Pfizer
Pfizer’s high-performance computing software and systems for worldwide research and development support large-scale data analysis, research projects, clinical analytics, and modeling. Pfizer’s computing services are used across the spectrum of research and development efforts, from the deep biological understanding of disease to the design of safe, efficacious therapeutic agents.
Case Study
Hospital Inventory Management
The hospital supply chain team is responsible for ensuring that the right medical supplies are readily available to clinicians when and where needed, and to do so in the most efficient manner possible. However, many of the systems and processes in use at the cancer center for supply chain management were not best suited to support these goals. Barcoding technology, a commonly used method for inventory management of medical supplies, is labor intensive, time consuming, does not provide real-time visibility into inventory levels and can be prone to error. Consequently, the lack of accurate and real-time visibility into inventory levels across multiple supply rooms in multiple hospital facilities creates additional inefficiency in the system causing over-ordering, hoarding, and wasted supplies. Other sources of waste and cost were also identified as candidates for improvement. Existing systems and processes did not provide adequate security for high-cost inventory within the hospital, which was another driver of cost. A lack of visibility into expiration dates for supplies resulted in supplies being wasted due to past expiry dates. Storage of supplies was also a key consideration given the location of the cancer center’s facilities in a dense urban setting, where space is always at a premium. In order to address the challenges outlined above, the hospital sought a solution that would provide real-time inventory information with high levels of accuracy, reduce the level of manual effort required and enable data driven decision making to ensure that the right supplies were readily available to clinicians in the right location at the right time.
Case Study
Gas Pipeline Monitoring System for Hospitals
This system integrator focuses on providing centralized gas pipeline monitoring systems for hospitals. The service they provide makes it possible for hospitals to reduce both maintenance and labor costs. Since hospitals may not have an existing network suitable for this type of system, GPRS communication provides an easy and ready-to-use solution for remote, distributed monitoring systems System Requirements - GPRS communication - Seamless connection with SCADA software - Simple, front-end control capability - Expandable I/O channels - Combine AI, DI, and DO channels
Case Study
Driving Digital Transformations for Vitro Diagnostic Medical Devices
Diagnostic devices play a vital role in helping to improve healthcare delivery. In fact, an estimated 60 percent of the world’s medical decisions are made with support from in vitrodiagnostics (IVD) solutions, such as those provided by Roche Diagnostics, an industry leader. As the demand for medical diagnostic services grows rapidly in hospitals and clinics across China, so does the market for IVD solutions. In addition, the typically high cost of these diagnostic devices means that comprehensive post-sales services are needed. Wanteed to improve three portions of thr IVD:1. Remotely monitor and manage IVD devices as fixed assets.2. Optimizing device availability with predictive maintenance.3. Recommending the best IVD solution for a customer’s needs.
Case Study
Fusion Middleware Integration on Cloud for Pharma Major
Customer wanted a real-time, seamless, cloud based integration between the existing on premise and cloud based application using SOA technology on Oracle Fusion Middleware Platform, a Contingent Worker Solution to collect, track, manage and report information for on-boarding, maintenance and off-boarding of contingent workers using a streamlined and Integrated business process, and streamlining of integration to the back-end systems and multiple SaaS applications.
