Keith Wild

Come listen to Keith Wild, Director, Internal Resource Management, of BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina share his experiences, lessons learned, and the value that Micro Focus delivered to modernize his organization's mission critical mainframe business processes.

SOA Express has enabled us to deliver Web and desktop access with dramatically improved performance on our platform of choice," said Keith Wild, Director of Internal Resource Management at BC/BSSC.

"With the majority of today's enterprise systems running on COBOL, skilled programmers are more important than ever in terms of allowing businesses like ours to continue to expand into newer technologies, such as Web services," said Keith Wild, director of programming support at Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina.

"With the majority of today's enterprise systems running on COBOL, skilled programmers are more important than ever in terms of allowing businesses like ours to continue to expand into newer technologies, such as Web services," said Keith Wild, director of programming support at Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina.

Keith Wild, director of internal resource management at BCBSSC, is responsible for supporting the organization's internal development team.According to Wild, BCBSSC has millions of lines of code in APS-based applications and 600 programmers trained in the language.

"The main reason ,to move off the mainframe for development, is because it's the direction Micro Focus has taken us," Wild said."The thrust of the movement is staying with APS and Micro Focus.
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According to Wild, BCBSSC has had a lot of Web services experience from very early on.As an insurance company, BCBSSC has to provide access to core data for claims and deductibles.That means giving customers access externally over the Web and delivering data to customer service representatives' desktops internally.

"Behind the scenes, we've always had connections to our mainframe systems," Wild said.

Wild uses Micro Focus' component generator to build Web services.He had been using older software, a screen scraping technology similar to IBM's HATS.

The ability to revisit, rewrite and reuse applications is very important in the insurance business where requirements are always changing.According to Wild, his team is constantly in upgrade mode with a system cycle that uses old and new code.

"We're doing a review of current Web services to see what we can combine and refine what we do.But that's more business analysis than software.We are typically business driven, so we make decisions based on business functionality, not technology," Wild said.