Leaf in the Wild: Foyer Assurances SA Moves from Relational Databases to MongoDB to Accelerate Digital Transformation

Mat Keep
July 25, 2016 | Updated: July 26, 2016
#Customer Stories#Business

Every enterprise is embarking on digital transformation – bringing applications and services online to more quickly and efficiently serve their customers and enter new markets. But some of their technology choices of the past are now holding them back.

I met with Damien Goosse, Chief Architect in the IT department at Foyer, to discuss how they turned to MongoDB to accelerate application innovation, and build new services that were just not possible with relational databases.

Can you start by telling us a little bit about your company?
The Foyer Group was founded back in 1922 and has grown to become market leader in Luxembourg’s insurance sector, and one of the country’s largest financial services companies, providing insurance, pension and asset management products to the consumer and corporate markets across Europe.

What are challenges are you trying to address with MongoDB?
We have traditionally built our applications on top of relational databases. But we are finding that they are increasingly holding back our digital transformation initiatives, and our strategy to accelerate application delivery by embracing agile development methodologies and cloud computing.

How is MongoDB helping you address those challenges?
We have several applications running on MongoDB today, with many new projects in the pipeline.

Our first application with MongoDB was a migration from one of the leading commercial relational databases. The application is used to capture customer data, which then drives back-end operational processes. We increasingly engage with our customers through web and mobile channels, using online forms to collect the information required for insurance quotes, applications, claims and other business applications. The forms are rich data structures, which we had to flatten and split across relational tables. Any new attributes we needed to capture through the forms incurred painful migrations to our relational database schema. These migrations meant lots of coordination between developers, DBAs, and the operations team, which slowed down how quickly we could implement feature enhancements for the business.

So we decided to switch the application to MongoDB. Now forms are stored in their native structures as JSON documents directly within MongoDB. This has given us a number of benefits: *We have removed the complex ORM layers that were required in the previous implementation to translate between application objects and the relational database schema. *We can add new attributes and features without the convoluted coordination cycles of the past, and without performance impact to our customer-facing applications. *It’s much easier for our backend business applications that need to process the form data to extract JSON data directly from MongoDB, without converting the data between different formats.

As a result of the migration to MongoDB, my team can innovate faster, responding instantly to business requirements, and we’ve seen significantly greater application performance, which translates directly to improved customer experience.

I believe you have also built a new mobile application using MongoDB? We have equipped our agents and partners with tablet devices, enabling them to more efficiently collect information when they are out with customers. All of the data they collect is stored locally on the device, and then securely synchronized back to our central MongoDB database when they are connected to the network.

This is a full-stack, end-to-end, JavaScript application. Using MongoDB’s flexible data model and native JSON support, we have been able to build this application in weeks, rather than the months it would have taken had we used our traditional relational database.

What led you to use MongoDB in the first place?
Recommendations from my developers. A number had used MongoDB in previous roles, and believed that it would be a great fit for us. I asked several members of the team to build a prototype app on MongoDB. They did it in hours. Not days or weeks.

Clearly there are many “NoSQL” choices available. For me, what was really critical in my final selection was production-proven deployments at scale, breadth of tooling, developer productivity, and community vibrancy. MongoDB was the clear leader across all of these dimensions.

Can you describe how you deploy MongoDB?
We are using the latest MongoDB 3.2 release. We deploy against MongoDB replica sets, which provides us fault tolerance against failures, and the ability to perform zero downtime maintenance operations. As we bring more projects onto MongoDB, we will move our replica sets to sharded clusters. All of our hosts run Red Hat Linux and VMware.

We are customers of MongoDB Enterprise Advanced, which provides our teams with access to 24x7 proactive support. As part of Enterprise Advanced, we make extensive use of Ops Manager to automate the configuration, provisioning and upgrading of our deployment. We also use its continuous backup with point in time recovery. I didn’t want my team to spend time scripting all of these operations. Ops Manager allows us to run a very lean and highly productive ops organization.

We will also be integrating MongoDB into our LDAP infrastructure in the next few months.

Do you make use of other MongoDB Services?
Yes, we have used MongoDB’s Production Readiness consulting service. The consultant was able to advise on our overall architecture, and help with MongoDB configuration best practices. The quality of the advice was extremely high, and was key in accelerating the launch of our new MongoDB services. We did initially use a third party consultancy that had worked with us in the past, but they did not have the depth of expertise we expected.

What advice would you give to someone considering MongoDB?
Take time to study the MongoDB documentation, and the online MongoDB University courses. These are both excellent resources that will get you up to speed quickly.

I think what is important is to select a meaningful project, and to use it in order to demonstrate productivity gains and quality of the applications you can build with MongoDB. You will always encounter someone within your organization who is cautious about selecting any new technology. So use your project as an example, to prove what is possible when you think outside of the world of relational databases.

Damian, thank you for taking the time to share your experiences with the MongoDB community.

Want to explore moving from relational databases to MongoDB?

Download our Migration Guide

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Healthcare Compliance Platform Enables Hospitals to Achieve Significant Savings in Drug Discounts

MongoDB Delivers Performance, Scale and Functionality to Help Verity Solutions Drive Competitive Advantage with Data-intensive Application Verity Solutions is driven to help healthcare organizations save money so they can extend care to those who need it most. Their technology enables hospitals to maintain compliance and maximize cost savings related to the healthcare industry law known as 340B. Enacted in 1992, 340B provides hospitals with economic relief from the financial burden of servicing indigent, under-insured, or uninsured patients. The Verity 340BTM platform built on MongoDB ingests data from a variety of hospital systems, including prescription, patient health, admission, discharge and drug provisioning data. It then matches that data against internal hospital dispensaries and third-party pharmacies to determine which prescriptions are eligible for discount. In turn, qualifying hospitals can take advantage of significant discounts off average wholesale drug prices. One hospital using Verity is able to provide millions in indigent care due to savings achieved through use of Verity’s product. When a pharmacy needs to replenish inventory, getting medications on the shelf is of utmost importance. The MongoDB-powered Verity platform delivers the operational reliability and availability to ensure hospitals can quickly restock prescriptions, all while avoiding non-compliance penalties and optimizing savings on qualified transactions. MongoDB gives us a competitive edge for our data-intensive application,” said Mark Cassidy, CTO, Verity Solutions. “We consistently hear from hospitals that tasks that require up to ten minutes to complete on competitive solutions are performed in mere seconds on our MongoDB-powered platform. MongoDB fit Verity’s requirements for scale, performance and operational efficacy. Developers are able to be more productive throughout the lifecycle with MongoDB’s document model that makes schema changes effortless, while ongoing administration, management and scaling operations have proven to be easy and efficient. MongoDB Cloud Manager, which provides comprehensive performance visibility and monitoring, also simplifies how Verity performs snapshot backups. MongoDB will also enable Verity to store all customer data in a single database in order to create benchmarks across hundreds of hospitals. With no standard reference currently available, this will be one of the first time hospitals have insight into how they compare with the rest of the industry on drug spend. If a hospital’s non-discounted drug spend is higher than others in a similar cohort, for example, the new insight provided by Verity will help the hospital identify new opportunities for cost savings. At the same time, if a hospital is doing well with their savings rate, Directors of Pharmacy gain concrete ROI data to share with the CFO. Leveraging this data across their entire customer base translates to competitive advantage for Verity. The more we can leverage the data assets we have, the more types of data we can ingest and apply various types of analytics that can be offered back to our customers,” said Cassidy. “With MongoDB, we have access to a wider scope of data that enables us to build new applications we may not have thought about in the past. Try MongoDB Enterprise Advanced

July 25, 2016
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Women Leaders at MongoDB: Lena Smart Discusses Clarity and Goal Setting

March is Women’s History Month. Our women leaders series highlights MongoDB women who are leading teams and empowering others to own their career development and build together. Lena Smart, Chief Information Security Officer, explains why words matter, shares her thoughts on leadership, and discusses MongoDB’s internal mentorship program “MentorHER”. Tell me a bit about your team. My team is responsible for all aspects of security of MongoDB’s global offices and employees. Within my organization I have Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and InfoSec (security engineering, physical security, etc.) under me. We are dedicated to making every effort to protect customer data, including continually improving security processes and controls. On top of that, we are committed to delivering the highest levels of standards conformance and regulatory compliance as part of our ongoing mission to address the most demanding security and privacy requirements of our customers. My goal is to build the best security and GRC team in the world. What characteristics make a good leader? In my opinion, good leaders are decisive and leave little room for ambiguity. They are understanding and know that people are depending on them for their careers, dreams, and aspirations. They make their work matter every day, are focused on continuous learning, and do not “rest on their laurels.” What has your experience been like as a woman growing your career in leadership? My experience as a woman leader has depended on the environment. It was very difficult as a CIO and CISO in the power industry. Every day I felt like I was being undermined by my peers, who (because they were all “power industry engineers”) felt they were the experts in everything to do with security (they were not). It was exhausting. I finally left and joined a FinTech company. That was better, but I still felt I could find an environment where women were actively encouraged to lead. Hence my move to MongoDB. I could not be happier here and love working with all our teams. Tell us about the biggest lesson you’ve learned throughout your career. The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that words matter. As a leader, people can interpret your words in many ways. Be clear in your message. I have a mantra on our team: “one voice, one message”. I encourage my team members to have all the internal discussion they want, but we do not ever air our dirty laundry in public. We stand with “one voice, one message”. People in general like clarity, and we try hard to enforce that idea within my team by encouraging each person to own what they do. What’s your advice for building and developing a team? I believe cultivating a supportive and positive team culture stems from the top down. I really embrace and follow MongoDB’s company values . Build Together is the main value I follow because, to me, people are everything. You need the right people in the right places owning what they do. I am also a huge advocate for people taking the initiative and building upon their own careers. I make sure to set aside a budget for training and certification programs for my team. This allows them to enhance their knowledge and helps them grow and develop into even stronger security and GRC professionals. I also started the Security Champions Program at MongoDB almost four years ago, a volunteer-based program that allows anyone who has an interest in security to join monthly meetings to learn more. Can you tell us a bit about the MentorHER program at MongoDB? I am honored to be the Executive Sponsor for a very important internal program called MentorHER. MentorHER aims to create diverse teams, develop female leaders, drive organizational changes, and enhance MongoDB’s reputation as an employer of choice. I’ve had a couple of mentors who made a positive impact on my career. I cherished our time together and made sure to have a clear understanding of the mentoring program I signed up for. There were goals, regular meetings, and a lot of positivity generated by mentoring. I hope we can replicate that at MongoDB with our MentorHER program. We have a very strong team leading the program, and I feel very confident that we will meet our goals and embrace the different experiences and perspectives of the women around us. What is your advice to women looking to grow their careers as leaders? My advice to other women is this: be clear and honest in what you want from a leadership role. At the C-suite level you will be pulled in many directions. Control that, from the start, where possible. It’s important to be intellectually honest and have clear goals that will help your team grow and mature, and the business flourish. Join a team that builds together every day. View open career opportunities at MongoDB.

March 27, 2023