DataDirect JDBC Drivers Are Key to Connection Reliability for Sentillion Customers

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Goal:

Bundle proven JDBC drivers to avoid customer connectivity problems.

Why they embed DataDirect:

Reputation for reliability and ability to support multiple database platforms with little extra work.

Business benefits:

DataDirect OEM Starter Program offered premium data connectivity with a minimal upfront investment. This was an important option for their newly shipping product. They also liked the ability to easily support more databases in the future with less development effort.

Technical benefits:

Performance and reliability.

Healthcare organizations that disseminate sensitive patient information often rely on Sentillion, Inc. Sentillion develops identity and access management solutions that help healthcare organizations deliver patient-related information in a secure manner. Sentillion's Vergence product suite enables authenticated single sign-on for the multiple healthcare applications typically found in medical organizations, as well as single-patient search across all those applications.

The ready availability of medical data can literally mean life or death in emergency healthcare situations. It's also the law. Recent legislation - most notably HIPAA (Health Information Portability and Accountability Act) - mandates healthcare organizations to modernize and streamline the Byzantine paperwork systems that have made the sharing of patient information amongst medical and insurance professionals notoriously onerous. At the same time, privacy provisions in the law task healthcare organizations with ensuring that easier access doesn't make it easier for unauthorized viewers to examine patient records.

Sentillion realized that the architecture of their suite gave them a unique opportunity to help customers comply with such regulations. While the Vergence products involve a thin client component, the Vergence applications (written in Java) actually run on network appliances. Since all the information access activity occurs at the server level, that information can be recorded and tracked automatically, and used to generate an audit trail showing precisely who accessed what information, from where, and at what times.

Connecting with Customers' Databases Must Work!

Sentillion developed the Vergence Privacy Auditor, which captures and compiles access information and writes it to a database provided by the customer. However, problems involving threading and multiple connections often cropped up when they used the JDBC drivers provided with the customers' databases. This was unacceptable. "Connecting with customers' databases may lack the glamour of an actual product feature," explains Mark Morwood, Sentillion's vice president of products, "but it absolutely must work."

DataDirect JDBC Drivers Safeguard Connection Reliability

Intrigued by the reputation of DataDirect's drivers, Sentillion decided to bundle DataDirect Connect® for JDBC with Vergence Privacy Auditor. Since Privacy Auditor is not a core revenue producer - it is marketed more as a value-added differentiator for the Vergence suite - DataDirect's OEM Starter Program appealed to Sentillion because it spared them having to make a considerable up-front investment in an untested offering. And, though the product's support for database platforms is currently restricted to Microsoft SQL Server, Morwood foresees support for other platforms down the road. "We'll have to do a bit of work for that," he says, "but not on the server. That's an advantage to us of DataDirect's JDBC drivers."

But performance and reliability remain the primary factor. "The DataDirect drivers work at a high level of performance, and work consistently," Morwood reports. "We have required almost no support - which is exactly what I wanted."