Increases the Pace of Digital Deliveries with a Unified Data Platform

Prior to developing the Unified Data Platform, Alight integrated back-end information within a web portal or a mobile app, for example. This approach had several drawbacks, particularly in the areas of performance, cost, and time-to-market for new solutions.

They needed to handle large-scale data changes based upon near-time or real-time events in the system so that they could refresh the cache on-demand with subsecond response times.

After further research, discussions with partners, vendors, and others in the industry; and some proof-of-concept (POC) projects the team was ready to move forward with their choice: Apache Kafka.

Alight Solutions

Alight Solutions, a leader in technology-enabled health, wealth, and human capital management solutions, recently embarked on an initiative to align the company’s internal organization with its next-generation digital strategy.

Alight used Confluent Platform, based on Apache Kafka, to build the streaming data pipelines that move data between systems and applications in the company’s Unified Data Platform.

Before jumping in with the implementation work, Alight development and operations teams attended onsite training provided by Confluent to accelerate ramp-up.

Following the training, the team’s focus shifted to getting Kafka up and running in the corporate data center, to the initial development of consumers and producers, and to setting up the processes that govern message extraction and publishing.