Without LAMP
[and its kick-a** community]
Innovation Will Die !

flickr@Rudy Malmquist

Without LAMP
[and its kick-a** community]
The Enterprise Will
propose and review operational
needs/company budgets, evaluate cost of
license TCO, deployment requirements and potential risks,
and determine that it is less costly to nothing instead since needs will change,
technology will evolve, and someone will quit by the time the budget is approved.

so maybe I’m kidding, but one set of
facts that I can stand behind are…

Without LAMP
change:healthcare Would Not have…
begun
developed
integrated
scaled
… Quite Frankly, we would not exist

flickr@beeyoutifulgirl

When I initially began to evaluate and
ask healthcare Enterprise-insiders
about platform options…

For application development, the
high-end “superplatforms” like
Microsoft, SAP, IBM, Oracle, and
BEA are the only risk-minimal
choices. Stick to industry standards
like J2EE or .NET

flickr@jaxxon

And so we
ignored industry!
… and instead choose a LAMP stack to develop, build, grow
and scale upon. And it is good.

Who We Are…
A simple, easy-to-use, and
confidential web-app that works
24/7 helping people save money
and make informed healthcare spending decisions.

(how we do it)…
Aggregate insurance claims, find the
best pricing available in an employer’s network
and make recommendations to each
employee that are always:
• Easy to understand
• Actionable
• Relevant to User

(what we did it with…)
• Red Hat Enterprise Server v5.*
• mysql databases
• Apache serving http/https
Mongrel handles dispatching requests to apache
Our application runs on Ruby and Rails
Talend used for data ETL magic
Data warehouse mods via Pentaho/Kettle

3 Facts

Fact 1…
I couldn't have bootstrapped the
platform, tools, and infrastructure
necessary to get the company rolling
without open source software.

Fact 2…
Raw claims data, proprietary formats that seem to
defy normalization. Were able to use open source
tools to come up with a “meaningful/flexible" schema
that contained everything we could possibly need in
our application, then modify from virtually any format
to fit this schema.
As we encountered scaling/performance issues, we
were able to quickly find solutions to scale broad
integration + normalization/matching algorithms from
100 claims per min to 6,000 per min.

Fact 3…
Twitter-bot Built using the twitter api
and two open sourced ruby gems. Having
these open source solutions available
allowed us to get a prototype running in
1 week.
Without these open source solutions (as well as Twitter's open API) it
would have taken 20x of dev time to accomplish the same result.

Something that can't be overstated:
open source is about
the community
If you have a problem either a) someone has encountered it
before and you can find the solution easily or
b) someone will help you problem-solve via the community
Everyone in the open source community believes in an
unwritten mantra of mutual collaboration and contribution.

flickr@beeyoutifulgirl