MHC Strengthens AI Efforts Through Progress Hybrid Data Pipeline
Industries:
Technology/SoftwareProducts:
DataDirectChallenge
Intelligent document automation solutions provider MHC needed to migrate its on-premises solution to the cloud to keep pace with a changing technology environment.
Solution
Conducted proof-of-concept which showed Hybrid Data Pipeline would meet many requirements with minimal integration work.
Result
As MHC enhances the MHC NorthStar solution with technology innovations, including AI, the Hybrid Data Pipeline solution will provide vital data connectivity moving forward.
Full Story
Challenge
MHC’s NorthStar document automation platform serves more than 1,000 customers across various industries, including financial services, healthcare, government, manufacturing, retail and more. As such, those customers operate in varied ERP environments, both on-premises and in the cloud. When MHC undertook the development of a cloud-based solution, that posed a number of challenges.
“Our thinking was our cloud application could talk to their ERP cloud application and everybody would be happy,” explained Tom McMahon, Senior Architect, MHC NorthStar Platform. “As we got further along in the process, we realized a lot of our existing customers were going to want to move to our cloud platform, but they weren’t necessarily going to move their ERPs to the ERP equivalent. So, we needed a way to get access to their on-premises data.”
It [Hybrid Data Pipeline] was straightforward to set up and get it up and running. It looked like it would address many requirements without a lot of work on our side to integrate into our system—and that’s when we decided to move forward with Progress.
Tom McMahon
Senior Architect at MHC NorthStar Platform
Solution
MHC recently completed a similar, although much smaller scale cloud project involving a printing solution where they built their own agent to access on-premises data.
“Our first thought was we’ll just make an agent to get access to the databases,” McMahon said. “But when we started looking into the challenges involved compared to the relatively simple print agent, we started looking into other solutions.”
The team began its due diligence and did a proof-of-concept with a vendor that returned unsatisfactory results. The team eventually came across the Progress® DataDirect® Hybrid Data Pipeline™ connectivity solution and saw promise in the product’s strong integration capabilities.
“We decided to do a proof-of-concept on Hybrid Data Pipeline,” McMahon said. “It was straightforward to set up and get it up and running. It looked like it would address many requirements without a lot of work on our side to integrate into our system—and that’s when we decided to move forward with Progress.”
Result
Beginning with the deployment and now more than three years later, the team at MHC has full confidence in the decision to move forward with the Hybrid Data Pipeline solution. They were particularly pleased with the solution’s containerized cloud native architecture that simplified deployment.
“We were able to implement everything directly in our existing workflows and pipelines with minimal effort,” said David Huynh, DevOps Manager, MHC. “Additionally, the amount of documentation and recommendations provided by Progress made it easy to monitor the platform.”
The powerful UI of the Hybrid Data Pipeline solution is also providing several benefits to MHC.
“The UI allows us to manage the integration setup without a lot of development required on our side,” he said. “We just had to do a small amount of development to facilitate a couple of infrastructure types of issues.”
The capabilities of the UI allowed MHC’s professional services team to quickly become experts in working with the solution, streamlining the customer onboarding process.
“I was able to sit down with a couple of folks on the customer support and professional services team and get them set up without any formal training,” McMahon said. “It’s intuitive enough that they were able to get the hang of it and figure it out themselves—and now they are experts with it.”
Another Progress advantage is the Hybrid Data Pipeline support team.
“Whenever there is a problem, and there haven’t been many, the support folks at Progress have been great,” he said. “They provide immediate help, we don’t have to wait 24 hours to get an answer, the responses are comprehensive and meaningful.”
Moving forward, as MHC strives to bring the highest level of innovation to its NorthStar solution for its customers, enhancing it with artificial intelligence and other transformative technologies, the Hybrid Data Pipeline solution is a valuable part of NorthStar’s infrastructure, providing vital data connectivity solutions.
The [Progress] Hybrid Data Pipeline product offering makes the ability to migrate customers to our SaaS solution so much easier, especially in the CCM space where we work with banks, insurance companies and wealth management. All these folks are concerned about the privacy of their data so to be able to have a secure easy way to communicate is a game changer and by allowing them to move most of their internal infrastructure to our SaaS environment they get the latest AI features, but it's still secure.
Shawn Philips
Product Manager at MHC NorthStar CCM