Cloud Delivered with a Rich Experience

ADP AdvancedMD delivers significant performance improvements to cloud customers.

The recent performance investments made to the AdvancedMD Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform have yielded substantial performance improvements for all our customers. The aggregate effect of these investments has been measured as a 73% decrease in outbound bandwidth utilization (Figure 1), as well as a 30% improvement in average transaction round-trip time (Figure 2), measured, in milliseconds, as the time between when the mouse is clicked in the browser at the physician’s office to when the data that was requested returns from AdvancedMD’s data center to the requesting PC. Imagine if Honda took their Accord, which gets 34 mpg, and upgraded it to 59 mpg for all customers, at no additional cost, while the cars were sitting in the garage.

(Figure 1)

The above chart generated by the AdvancedMD Data Center Operations team measures bandwidth utilization in megabits between April 2009 and January 2010. The blue graph line represents outbound bandwidth used for sending data from the AdvancedMD SaaS data center to Internet-connected customer applications.

As options for this performance-improvement release were researched, the team understood that the desired enhancements to the data center infrastructure were well beyond what a typical data center would need. Instead, the team looked at dividing the user experience into three layers: the browser: the time on the Internet (latency) and the data center. As a result, several optimization options were considered and ultimately implemented. The technologies described in this document delivered a 30% improvement in the customer’s transaction response experience. Delivering a controlled customer experience through the open Internet is something that is definitely not beyond our control.

The Browser

What can be done at the browser level? More than most people think. In this particular release, the number of downloads required to draw a new screen or refresh a screen with new data was reduced. This is an important improvement, for each downloaded item carries overhead. Fewer downloaded items also means the customer’s browser simply spends less time connecting to the remote data center, which frees it up to spend more time presenting information to the user. One of the benefits to the customer is lower bandwidth utilization. Say the customer location has a business-class Internet connection that was nearing capacity, such as a T1 cable modem or DSL. With this performance improvement, the AdvancedMD application is now using less of the customer’s Internet connectivity capacity, which extends the life of that connectivity resource.

An activity that impacts performance even more is the time it takes to traverse the distance between point A and point B. When the number of round trips between the browser and the data center are reduced, the time it takes to draw a new screen is significantly reduced. As a result, the AdvancedMD customer, on average, experiences faster screen builds, otherwise known as response rates.

(Figure 2)

The Internet

With its recent investment in Akamai technology, the AdvancedMD application can now take advantage of application content stored on distributed Akamai servers, located within the Internet. Additionally, Akamai technology improves the route a data packet takes to get to the data center, using predictive "traffic jam" avoidance technology. Avoiding "route-jams" on the Internet results in a faster, more consistent experience for the SaaS-based application user.

The Data Center

Prior to this performance release, AdvancedMD had made heavy investments in improving data center speed through a number of activities, one of which was the purchase of high performance SAN storage technology. The data center is architected so that transactions "get to disk" quickly. As a result, the data center is very fast when it comes to serving up customer data requests.

The AdvancedMD Competitive Advantage

While many competitors claim to offer web-hosted applications, many have merely taken an application designed as a local client/server application, implemented it in a managed hosting facility and enabled browser-based access into the application. These vendors are spending the bulk of their infrastructure development time engineering a conversion from the legacy client/server architecture to an Internet-based architecture.

In contrast, the AdvancedMD Medical Practice Optimization platform was built from the ground up as a SaaS-based application, designed to support multiple customers connected over the Internet to our data center. As a result, development time is focused on improving not only feature and functions, but on improving the overall speed and efficiency of the Software-as-a-Service platform.

^{Source: AdvancedMD technical leaders involved in the 5.8 Performance Release are: Sheridan Richey, VP Engineering and Scott Barnhill, Director, IT.}