Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how claims clearinghouse Navicure has harnessed virtualization to meet the demands of an ever-growing business.

1. Navicure Gains IT Capacity Optimization and Performance
Monitoring Using VMware vSphere with Operations
Management
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how claims clearinghouse Navicure has harnessed
virtualization to meet the demands of an ever-growing business.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
from the 2013 VMworld Conference in San Francisco. We're here the week of
August 26 to explore the latest in cloud-computing and virtualization
infrastructure developments.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host
throughout the series of VMware sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions.
[Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Our next innovator interview focuses on how a company is gaining better control and
optimization across its IT infrastructure. We're going to hear how IT leaders at Navicure have
been exploring a comprehensive monitoring and operational management approach.
To understand how they're using dashboards and other analysis to tame IT complexity and gain
better return on their investments, please join me in welcoming Donald Wilkins, the Director of
Information Technology at Navicure Inc. in Duluth Georgia. Welcome, Donald.
Donald Wilkins: Glad to be here.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about why your organization is focused on taming complexity. Is this
a focus that's a result of cost or is it a complexity or both?
Wilkins: At Navicure, we've been focused on scaling a fast-growing business. And if you
incorporate very complex infrastructure, it becomes more difficult
to scale it. So we're focused on technologies that are simple to
implement, but yet have a lot of upward availability of growth
from the storage, the infrastructure, and the software we use. We
do that in order to be able to scale that growth we needed to satisfy
our business objectives.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about Navicure, what you do, how is that you're growing, and why
that's putting a burden on your IT systems.
Wilkins: Navicure has been around for about 12 years. We started the company in about 2001
and delivered the product to our customers in the late 2001-2002 timeframe. We've been growing

2. very fast. We're adding 20 to 30 employees every year, and we're up to about 230 employees
today.
We have approximately 50,000 physicians on our system. We're growing at a rate of 8,000 to
10,000 physicians a year, and it’s a healthy growth. We don't want to grow too fast, so as not to
water down our products and services, but at the same time, we want to grow at a pace that better
enables us to deliver better products for our customers.
Customer service is one of the foundation cornerstones of our business. We feel that our
customers are number one, and retaining those customers is one of our primary goals.
Gardner: As I understand, you're an Internet-based medical claims clearinghouse. Tell us what
that boils down to. What is that you do?
Revenue cycle management
Wilkins: Claim clearinghouses have been around for a couple of decades now. We've evolved
from that claim-clearinghouse model to what we refer to as revenue cycle
management. We pioneered that term early as we started the company.
We take the transactions from physicians and send them to the insurance
companies. That’s what the clearinghouse model is. But on that product, we added
a lot of value-added services, a lot analytics around those transactions to help the
provider generate more revenue for their transactions. They get paid faster and
that they get paid the first time through the system.
It was very costly for transactions to be delayed weeks because of poorly submitted transactions
to the insurance company or denials because they coded something wrong.
We try to catch all that, so that they get paid the first time through. That’s the return on
investment (ROI) that our customers are looking for when they look at our products, to lower the
AR days and to increase their revenue at the bottom line.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about your IT environment. What do you have in your data center.
Then, we'll get to how you've been able to better manage it.
Wilkins: The first thing we did at Navicure, when we started the company, is we looked at and
decided that we didn't want to be in the data-center business. We wanted to use a colo that does
that work at a much higher level of standard than we could ever do. We wanted to focus on our
product and let the colo focus on what they do.
They serve us from our infrastructure standpoint, and then we can focus on our products and
build a good product. With that, we adopted very early on, the grid approach or the rack

3. approach. This means that we wanted to build a foundational structure that we can just build on,
as we get go into business and growing the transaction volume.
That terminology has changed over the years and that can be referred to a software-defined
infrastructure today, but back then it was that we wanted to build infrastructure that would have a
grid approach to it, so we could plug in more modules and components to add to scale out as we
scale up.
With that, we continued to evolve what we do, but that inherent structure is still there. We need
to be able to scale our business as our transactional volume doubles approximately every two
years.
Gardner: And how did you begin your path to virtualization, and how did that progress into this
more of a software-defined environment?
Ramping up fast
Wilkins: In the first few years of the operation of the company, we really had enough
headroom in our infrastructure that it wasn't a big issue, but as we got four years into the
company, we started realizing that we were going to hit a point where we would have to start
ramping up really fast.
Consolidation was not something that we had to worry about, because we didn’t have a lot to
consolidate. It was a very early product, and we had to build customer base. We had to build our
reputation in the industry and we did that, but then we started adding physicians by the thousands
to our system every year.
With that, we started to have to add infrastructure. Virtualization came along at such a time that
we could add it virtually faster and more efficiently than we could ever have if we added
physical infrastructure.
So it became a product that we put in a test, dev, and production all at the same time, but it was
something that just allowed us to meet the demands of the business.
Gardner: Of course, as many organizations have used virtualization to their benefit, they've also
recognized that there is some complexity involved and getting better management means further
optimization, which further reduces costs. That also, of course, maintains their performance
requirements. How did you then focus in on managing and optimizing this over time?
Wilkins: Well, some of the things we tried to look at, when we look at products and services, is
to keep it simple. I have a very limited staff, and the staff needs to be able to drive to the point of
whatever issue they're researching and/or inspecting.

4. As we've added technologies and services, we tried to add those that are very simple to scale,
very, very simple to operate. We look at all these different tools to make that happen. This has led
us to new products like VMware as they have also tried to drive to the same level, trying to
simplify their product offering with their products.
Gardner: Which products you are using? Maybe you could be more specific about what's
working best for you.
Wilkins: For years, we've been doing monitoring with other tools that were network-based
monitoring tools. Those drive only so much value. They give us things like up-time alerting and
responsiveness that are just about when issues happen. We want to evolve that to be more
proactive in our approach to monitoring.
It’s not so much about how we can fix a problem when there is one. It’s more of, let’s keep the
problem from happening to start with. That's where we've looked at some products for that.
Recently we've actually implemented vCenter Operations Manager.
That product gives us a different twist that other SMNP monitoring tools do. It's a history of
what's going on, but also a future analysis of that history and how it will change, based on our
historical trends.
New line-up
Gardner: Of course, here at VMworld, we're hearing vSphere improvements and upgrades,
but also Operations Management is now at 5.5. Is there anything in the new line-up that is
particularly of interest to you, and have you had a chance to look at over?
Wilkins: I haven’t had a chance to look over the most recent offering, but we're running the
current version. Again, for us, it's the efficiency mechanism inside the product that drives the
most value for us to make sure that we can budget a year in advance of the expanding
infrastructure that we need to have to meet the demands.
Gardner: What sort of paybacks are there? Do you have any sense on a metrics or ROI basis?
What you have been able to gain maybe through virtualization generally, and then the improved
operations of those of workloads over time?
Wilkins: Just being able to drive more density in our colo by being virtualized is a big value for
us. Our footprint is relatively small. As for an actual dollar amount, it’s hard to pin something on
there. We're growing so fast, we're trying to keep up with the demand, and we've been meeting
that and exceeding that.
Really, the ROI is that our customers aren’t experiencing major troubles with our infrastructure
not expanding fast enough. That's our goal, to drive high availability for infrastructure and low
downtime, and we can do that with VMware and with their products and service.

5. Gardner: How about looking to the future, Donald? Do you have any sense of whether things
like disaster recovery or mobile support, perhaps even hybrid cloud services, will be something
you would be interested in as you grow further?
Wilkins: We're a current customer of Site Recovery Manager. That's a staple in our virtual
infrastructure and has been since 2008. We've been using that product for many years. It drives
all of the planning and the testing of our virtual disaster recovery (DR) plan. I've been a very big
proponent of that product and services for years, and we couldn’t do without it.
There are other products we will be looking at. Desktop virtualization is something that will be
incorporated into the infrastructure in the next year or two. It’s just one of those things.
As a small business, the value of that becomes a little harder to prove from a dollar standpoint.
Some of those features like remote working come into play as office space continues to be
expensive. It's something we will be looking at to expand our operations, especially as we have
more remote employees working, Desktop virtualization is going to be a critical component for
that.
Gardner: How about some 20/20 hindsight. If there were other folks that were ramping up on
virtualization, or getting to the point where complexity was becoming an issue for them, do you
have any thoughts on getting started or lessons learned that you could share?
Trusted partner
Wilkins: The best thing with virtualization is to get a trusted partner to help you get over the
hurdle of the technical issues that may bring themselves to light.
I had a very trusted partner when I started this in 2005-2006. They actually just sat with me and
worked with me, with no compensation whatsoever, to help work through virtualization. They
made it such an easy value that it just became, "I've got to do this, because there's no way I can
sustain this level of operational expense and of monitoring and managing this infrastructure, if
it's all physical."
So, seeing that value proposition from a partner is key, but it has to be a trusted partner. It has to
be a partner that has your best interest in mind, and not so much a new product to sell. It’s going
to be somebody that brings a lot to the table, but, at the same time, helps you help yourself and
lets you learn these products, so that you can actually implement it and research it on your own
to see what value you can bring into the company.
It’s easy for somebody to tell you how you can make your life better, but you have t to actually
see it, because then, you become a passionate person for the technology, and then you become a
person that realizes you have to do this and will do whatever it takes to get this in here, because
it will make your life easier.

6. Gardner: How about specific advice for mid-market organizations, not too large. Is there
something about dashboard, single pane, ease in getting a sense as the head of IT in your
organization, over all the systems? Is there anything in particular that helps on that visualization
basis that you would recommend that others perhaps consider?
Wilkins: Well, vCenter Operations Manager is key to understanding your infrastructure. If you
don’t have it today, you're going to be very reactive to some of your pains and the troubles you're
dealing with.
That product, while it does allow you to do a lot of research for various problems and services to
drill down from the cluster level, down into the virtual machine levels and find out where your
problems and pain points or, actually allows you to more quickly isolate the issue. At the same
time, it allows you to project where you're growing and where you need to put your money into
resources, whether that's more storage, compute resources, or network resources.
That's where we're seeing value out of the product, because it allows me to go during budget
cycles to say that looking at infrastructure and our current growth, we will be out of resources by
this time. We need to add this much, based on our current growth. Barring additional new
products and services we may be coming up with, we may be adding to our service, if we don't
do anything today. We're growing at this pace and here's the numbers to prove it.
When you have that information in front of you, you can actually build a business case around
that that further educates the CFOs and the finance people to understanding what your troubles
are and what you have to deal with on a day-to-day basis to operate the business.
Gardner: Must feel good to have some sense of being future proof, no matter what comes down
you are going to be prepared for it.
Wilkins: Most definitely.
Gardner: Well, great. We'll have to leave it there. We've been talking about how an organization
is gaining better control and optimization over their IT infrastructure, and we have heard how
Navicure has been exploring comprehensive, monitoring, and operational management approach.
So a big thank you to our guest. We have been here with Donald Wilkins, the Director of IT at
Navicure. Thank Donald.
Wilkins: My pleasure. Thank you.
Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast coming to you from the
2013 VMworld Conference in San Francisco.
I'm Dana Gardner; Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout the series of
VMware sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next
time.

7. Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Sponsor: VMware
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how claims clearinghouse Navicure has harnessed
virtualization to meet the demands of an ever-growing business. Copyright Interarbor Solutions,
LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.
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