Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota

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Fujitsu teams with Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota to Create New e-Business Strategy

New e-Business Strategy Derives Move to Solaris

In 1933, when Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota was founded. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the country's new president, and television was about to be invented. Times have changed, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota has kept up with them. Today Minnesota's oldest health plan (and the nation's second oldest) has grown to cover more than two million people and is currently enhancing its presence in cyberspace. To take advantage of these growth opportunities, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota decided to expand into the Solaris world, placing its confidence in a Fujitsu PRIMEPOWER 1000 enterprise server to provide the performance, availability, and flexibility to do the job.

Advanced partitioning proves key:

Up until December 2000, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota depended on an older computer system that lacked the horsepower required by its growing business. Users needed faster response times to be as productive and creative as they could be, and this need coincided with the new requirements of an enhanced e-business strategy. It was time to go shopping

"We wanted to make a commitment to Solaris, because that was the biggest presence in the Web world," says Jerry High, manager of Distributed Computing Systems Engineering, whose group is charged with providing the architecture and application infrastructure to support job development and an expanded web site.

Because Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota had had a good relationship in the past with Amdahl (a subsidiary of Fujitsu Limited), High and his colleagues decided to investigate Fujitsu's PRIMEPOWER series.