FAST FACTS
Customer: Seedco (www.seedco.org)
Industry: Philanthropy, not-for-profit organizations
Geography: New York
Business Challenge: An aging, inflexible legacy system could no longer support Seedco's highly successful EarnBenefits program that helps low-income workers access a range of public and private benefits and work supports.
Solution: A web-based application built using JBoss Enterprise Middleware running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Software: JBoss Enterprise Middleware, JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System, Hibernate Framework, JBoss Seam Framework and Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Hardware: Industry-standard Intel-based x86 servers
Benefits: The new application allowed Seedco to streamline the process of determining eligibility and accelerate access to benefits by qualified individuals. The solution also contributed to the organization's bottom line, as other non-profit organizations are licensing the software solution to use in their own benefits programs.
“JBoss Enterprise Middleware is an extremely sophisticated technology that can be used to address almost every kind of enterprise problem. I really don't see any other offering that competes with it.”
-- Jake Kirby, Vice President of Information Technology, Seedco
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BACKGROUND
Seedco is a national nonprofit organization that advances economic opportunity for people, businesses and communities in need. Founded in 1986 with funds from the Ford Foundation, Seedco has become a model for how community development organizations can best serve their constituents. Seedco and its subsidiary Seedco Financial Services have operations in 17 states and the District of Columbia. Seedco’s leadership in designing innovative programs, partnership and services for workers, families and businesses is widely recognized throughout the economic and workforce development community.
BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
Since 2003, Seedco has offered its EarnBenefits service, which assists low-wage workers to access government and private benefits for which they qualify. This program has been one of Seedco’s biggest success stories. After all, due to the paperwork, red tape, and general complexity of the application processes for programs such as food stamps and Medicare, many people who are eligible never receive these critical work and family supports. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), only 61 percent of people eligible for food stamps actually participate
1. This number drops precipitously with age: Only 28 percent of eligible seniors take advantage of the program
2. Seedco’s EarnBenefits service was specifically designed to address this issue through technology. By building an application that partially automated the process of determining eligibility, Seedco opened the doors for more people to get much-needed assistance.
“There are so many levels of government, so many rules, which are constantly changing, and so much data to be collected that applicants get lost in the process,” said Aaron Trauring, technical lead of Seedco’s EarnBenefits Online (EBO) initiative.
Seedco created EBO to build upon and expand the success of the EarnBenefits program. Although the legacy application supporting EarnBenefits had been considered state-of-the-art in 2003, by 2008 it was clear that the aging system was inflexible to meet Seedco’s growing needs. Trauring, who led the software development team charged with replacing the system, knew this wouldn’t be an easy task.
“Applications capable of supporting the benefits application process are huge, very complex, and need to be able to capture hundreds of data points from applicants,” said Trauring. Trauring decided to rewrite the application using a multi-tiered architecture that provided users with access over the web using a standard web browser. “We wanted to develop a platform that would be extremely flexible and scalable and which we could roll out in multiple states, each of which has its own programs and processes for qualifying people for benefits,” said Trauring.
For the core of the new system, Trauring needed a middleware architecture that was flexible enough to handle the enormous variation in data requirements and qualifying attributes that existed between local, state, and federal aid programs. The architecture needed to have a robust rules capability—and that rules function had to have an easy-to-use interface that would allow non-technical users to add, adjust, and delete rules without IT intervention.
“One of the challenges we have is managing the constant changes due to new programs, new regulations, and new legislation,” said Jake Kirby, vice president of information technology at Seedco. For example, he said, the healthcare reform bill recently passed is going to have enormous ramifications for existing social programs. “We wanted to do as little software programming as possible to update the rules in the application—and for that, we needed technology that would give our non-IT users the ability to change rules quickly and easily as necessary.”
There were other business requirements as well that dictated the need for a robust middleware solution. For example, once the qualification process is complete—and it involves complex logic and “branching” based upon the individual answers applicants provide—the application needed to interface with a client management system that guides applicants through the rest of the application process — filing claims by email or U.S. mail, following up on claims, and regularly verifying that they are taking full advantage of benefits programs offered by different government agencies.
1 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Food and Nutrition Service, Food Stamp Program Participation Rates: 2004, June 2006, available at http://www.fns.usda.gov/oane/menu/Published/FSP/FSPPartNational.htm
2 Ibid
SOLUTION
After an exhaustive search that included evaluating the leading middleware products on the market—proprietary as well as open source solutions—Seedco chose JBoss Enterprise Middleware. “We looked at a lot of alternatives—especially rules engines — but we were very attracted to open source in general and JBoss Enterprise Middleware in particular because of the JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System,” said Kirby. “These were very sophisticated yet low-cost solutions that exactly suited our requirements.”
To keep costs low, Seedco built its new EBO application on industry-standard, Intel-based servers. It chose Red Hat Enterprise Linux as the operating system and ended up using the entire JBoss Enterprise Middleware stack. The centerpiece of the application was the JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System, which includes a fast and highly efficient rules engine, easy-to-use rules development and management systems, and a repository. Once rules are encoded in the IT application infrastructure, it is easy for business users to manage them.
The JBoss Seam Framework was also a critical part of the solution. A powerful open source development platform for building rich Internet applications in Java, Seam integrates technologies such as Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), JavaServer Faces (JSF), Java Persistence (JPA), Enterprise Java Beans (EJB 3.0) and business process management (BPM) into a unified full-stack solution.
Seedco also chose the JBoss Hibernate Framework so it could isolate the back-end database in a way that would allow it to change databases without affecting the application.
BENEFITS
Seedco started working on the application in July 2008 and rolled out a beta version in New York in January 2009 for 20 users. Satisfied with the quality and performance of the application, in April 2009 Seedco began implementing it across the country. It is now deployed in 15 localities in seven states, with more than 700 users.
To date, EarnBenefits Online has connected economically disadvantaged individuals with more than 97,000 recorded benefits totaling more than $118 million in value.
JBoss Enterprise Business Rules Management System did not disappoint. Today, business users across the country can quickly respond to changes in government regulations and policies by changing the application’s rules as needed without having to wait for software developers to write new code.
The Seam Framework also offered significant advantages. “Because we’re planning to distribute this application across the country, we didn’t want to have to install the software at our clients, but to use the web instead,” said Aaron Trauring. “What’s nice about JSF and RichFaces and Seam is that we can develop very sophisticated rich applications that we can constantly change as necessary.” Seedco’s software development team is able to roll out new features and capabilities every three months, and because everyone is using a web browser to access the application, it all works seamlessly. “We could never have done that without Seam,” said Trauring.
The Red Hat Hibernate Framework also turned out to be essential to the success of the project. A powerful, high-performance object/relational persistence and query service, Hibernate lets businesses avoid being locked in to individual databases. “Red Hat advertises the fact that if you use Hibernate, the database you use on the back end doesn’t matter, and that you can easily change database vendors without affecting the application,” said Trauring. “With our very complex data model, the MySQL database simply wasn’t robust enough.” His team actually switched databases to Postgres behind the scenes after the initial application had been rolled out—and users didn’t even notice. “This proof of concept was very impressive,”
Seedco is now finding that its application can be used as a revenue generator as well. Non-profits continually struggle for cash, so this development is a welcome addition to the operating budget. “As word about this application spreads, other non-profit organizations have come to Seedco to license it,” said Kirby. “They tell us that this is the most sophisticated solution available—not just as a commercial package, but also compared to anything they could develop in-house."
Looking forward, Seedco expects to be using Red Hat technologies in other key projects. "JBoss Enterprise Middleware is an extremely sophisticated technology, and you can use it to address almost every kind of enterprise problem," said Kirby. "I really don't see any other offering that competes with it."
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