Press Release

BEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 4, 2009-- DataDirect Technologies, the unparalleled leader in data connectivity and mainframe integration and an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS), today announced that Antares Management Solutions, a business division of Medical Mutual Services, LLC., is using the DataDirect^® Shadow^® product to integrate mainframe data into a service-oriented claims processing application to improve the efficiency of medical billing and customer service.

As a premier provider of business process and information technology outsourcing, Antares Management Solutions designs and maintains information technology systems and develops software applications to meet the needs of its customers in insurance, manufacturing, and other industries. The auto-adjudication technology was created specifically for Medical Mutual of Ohio and its TOPPS system. In an effort to address the business need to support physicians and providers with patient liability information in real-time, Antares set out to build a robust claims processing application that would allow physician offices to submit claim information and immediately get processing results. The new Web-based application would allow patients to know, at the point of service, the total amount owed for the medical procedure.

To address integration and agility challenges common to modernizing legacy applications, the company adopted a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) approach. The existing insurance claims processing application relied on mainframe green screens within the Customer Information Control System (CICS) as the primary interface to access billing information stored within a mainframe DB2 database. Antares sought a third-party technology that could transform the CICS screens into Web services to integrate the legacy billing application with the new online claims application – a fundamental step toward their SOA goals.

“Antares is dedicated to providing software applications and IT services that deliver exceptional value to our customers,” said Beverly Seese, Manager, Information Systems Development at Antares. “We recognized that greater efficiencies and faster service could be achieved by updating the back-end infrastructure of our claims-based application to support a more flexible SOA. We wanted to create a highly intuitive, performance-driven application that leveraged the significant financial investment in existing systems. DataDirect Shadow proved to be a key component to this strategic initiative.”

The DataDirect Shadow platform is a single, unified integration architecture supporting mainframe SOA enablement and data integration. The product simplifies the integration of mainframe data or applications (business logic or green screens) with applications built on distributed Java™ or .NET application frameworks. The DataDirect Shadow product’s industry standard architecture can support a wide range of integration paradigms including SQL, Web services, data events (change data capture) and Web enablement across a comprehensive list of mainframe data sources. By eliminating the necessity to support redundant point integration solutions, DataDirect Shadow lowers mainframe integration costs, complexity and points of failure. By establishing a more efficient development environment using DataDirect Shadow, Antares was able to make better use of its existing mainframe resources for improved operational efficiency and cost savings.

“With DataDirect Shadow, Antares was able to rapidly transform Medical Mutual of Ohio’s existing legacy applications into industry standard Web services that could be easily repurposed to support the new real-time claims processing application, or for that matter, any other new business services,” said Gregg Willhoit, chief architect, DataDirect Technologies. “During these difficult economic times, tools like DataDirect Shadow can be invaluable when the needs of a business demand new services to be created rapidly and within existing budget constraints.”

For organizations that rely on mainframe technology, DataDirect Technologies has made it simple and cost-effective to integrate the mainframe into a SOA. The DataDirect Shadow product’s unique exploitation of IBM’s new mainframe specialty engines – the zIIP and zAAP – offers dramatically improved mainframe total-cost-of-ownership and significantly better performance for mainframe SOA and data connectivity. For more information visit, www.datadirect.com/products/mainframe-integration/index.ssp

About Antares Management Solutions

An industry leader in providing state-of-the-art Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) and Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), Antares Management Solutions allows companies to cut costs while concentrating on their core business. Headquartered in Strongsville, Ohio, the company designs and maintains information technology systems, develops software applications to meet customer needs and administers information technology services. For more information, visit www.AntaresSolutions.com.

About DataDirect Technologies

DataDirect Technologies is the software industry’s only comprehensive provider of software for connecting the world’s most critical business applications to data and services, running on any platform, using proven and emerging standards. Developers worldwide depend on DataDirect® products to connect their applications to an unparalleled range of data sources using standards-based interfaces such as ODBC, JDBC™ and ADO.NET, XQuery and SOAP. More than 300 leading independent software vendors and thousands of enterprises rely on DataDirect Technologies to simplify and streamline data connectivity for distributed systems and to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration. DataDirect Technologies is an operating company of Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS). For more information, visit www.datadirect.com.

DataDirect, Shadow z/Services, and Shadow are trademarks or registered trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Java and all Java based marks are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.

Source: DataDirect Technologies

DataDirect Technologies
April Harned, 646-246-0484
april.harned@datadirect.com