A wholly-owned subsidiary of PRA Health Sciences, Symphony Health is a leading provider of high-value data, analytics, and technology solutions for biopharmaceutical manufacturers, healthcare providers, and payers. Symphony Health has leveraged Syncsort Connect for Big Data to speed time to value of analytics for employees and customers, all while improving IT processes and lowering costs. Here is what you should expect during this Syncsort Customer Webinar:
• A 15-minute overview of Symphony Health’s experience using Connect for Big Data
• How Symphony Health was able to solve the problem of data latency and offload
• Q&A session during which Symphony Health answered questions live audience members had about their experiences with Connect for Big Data
1. Symphony Health
Customer Story
Rob Hathaway - Symphony Health
Director, Big Data Applications Development
Arianna Valentini - Syncsort
Product Marketing Manager
1
2. Housekeeping
Webcast Audio
• Today’s webcast audio is streamed through your
computer speakers.
• If you need technical assistance with the web
interface or audio, please reach out to us using
the chat window.
Questions Welcome
• Submit your questions at any time during the
presentation using the chat window.
• We will answer them during our Q&A session
following the presentation.
Recording and slides
• This webcast is being recorded. You will receive an
email following the webcast with a link to
download both the recording and the slides.
Rob Hathaway
Symphony Health
Arianna Valentini
Syncsort
5. Improves scalability and
interoperability for cluster
deployments and data pipelines
Handle batch and
streaming with ease
Design once, deploy
anywhere approach
Bring ALL data into Big Data
frameworks
Worry about innovation
not your systems
Connect
for Big Data
5
6.
7. Company
Overview
Industry:
Data Science for Healthcare
Size & Geography:
• 16,000+ employees working in
75 office locations in
80+ countries
• $2 Billion Revenue
• Provider of high-value data,
analytics, and technology
solutions for biopharmaceutical
manufacturers, healthcare
providers, and payers
• Health research, analytics and
consulting expertise
Founded:Products & Services:
1982
7
8. Symphony Healthcare IT Team
• Part of the larger global IT organization
• Broken into in smaller teams for work on a specific product
line
• My team’s focus is on building frameworks and pipelines for
the ingestion of data (medical, pharmacy, and hospital claims)
across different product groups
• Teams are in charge of all the application development for a
particular product line
• Integrated data is fed back to the business or directly sent
back to the client
8
9. • Redefine clinical development process to be
more patient-centric
• Expand data services expertise in existing and
new areas
• Build deeper and broader relationships with
pharmaceutical and other healthcare companies
Business: Key Strategic Initiatives
9
10. • Increase use of Hadoop and database offloading
• Decrease use and reduce costs associated with
Oracle and Informatica
• Improve the speed of data delivery for clinical
research
• “Save lives faster”
Tech: Key Strategic Initiatives
10
11. Challenge: Improve Data Delivery
• Minimize data latency
• Oracle and Informatica databases costly and inefficient
• Slow runtimes
• Hadoop requires hard to find skills, i.e. Java MapReduce
• Business analysts and data scientists had to request
schemas for analysis, causing delayed data
delivery/discovery
• Increase the value of analytics for employees
and customers
11
12. How Syncsort helps with database offloading
Connect for Big Data +
Cloudera’s Distribution of
Hadoop (CDH)
Solution
• Average of a 3-5X performance increase
• In one module, runtime went from 20 minutes to 20 seconds
• Decoupled code from Informatica
• Better use and adoption of Hadoop throughout the company
• Faster development and delivery time
• Access to a greater talent pool that do not need to have
specialized Hadoop knowledge
• Faster ramp up time with developers
Impact
12
13. POC with Kafka
• Exercise in educating the team on how to use Kafka for development.
• Connect provided the “hook” to get started.
• Proof of concept with Kafka using Connect for Big Data.
• Kafka as source and target, using Connect for Big Data as the
translation layer.
• During POC no one needed to learn Scala.
• Showed that we are able to use Connect to go from platform
to platform helping team to learn what is new quickly.
13
14. Recommendations
• Push through initial setup with a new platform. It’s worth the climb.
• No matter how easy a tool – keep good software best practices.
• Just because a tool is easy to use, it’s important to keep up
continued learning of that solution.
• Invest in making developers and users experts
in the tool.
14