Customer Spotlight: PrimeRx
For over three decades, PrimeRx (formerly Micro Merchant Systems) has been a leading name in the pharmaceutical software industry, building healthier communities nationwide. By empowering pharmacists to focus on patient care, PrimeRx has earned prestigious accolades in recent years including the Stevie Award for Achievement in Product Innovation. As the company evolved, leadership took on the challenge of modernizing their sophisticated enterprise platform to meet the demands of the rapidly evolving pharmaceutical industry.
PrimeRx serves a diverse clientele, from local community pharmacies to large hospital chains, managing everything from electronic prescriptions to patient engagement portals. However, as they pushed towards a cloud first architecture and the launch of their new PrimeRx CLOUD platform, they needed to embrace new technologies including containerization. "Our existing systems were robust, but we needed to move beyond Windows and .NET Framework to a more flexible, cloud-native architecture," explains Joe Klimowicz, Director of Cloud and Platform Engineering. "We were looking for a platform-as-a-service that was easy to use, would give us a lot of flexibility, and allow us to operate with minimal staff."
Enterprise Architecture Constraints within Azure
In their move towards a modern cloud first infrastructure, PrimeRx had to decide whether to utilize a self-hosted k8s platform or leverage SaaS. Containerization and deployment adjustments to on-premises Windows and .NET framework applications posed challenges within Azure's ecosystem, limiting flexibility in evolving the platform.
Centralizing Business Logic for Faster Innovation
PrimeRx set out to develop cutting-edge features and products as part of its next phase of innovation. A major hurdle was decoupling core business logic from the monolithic system and centralizing it to improve agility. The team needed to transition to a shared services model that allowed for component re-usability across multiple products, reducing duplication and accelerating development cycles.
Balancing Resource Efficiency with Critical Services
As a provider of crucial pharmacy management services handling sensitive patient data, PrimeRx couldn't afford to compromise on system availability or data integrity in their modernization efforts. "We needed a solution that could support interoperability while maintaining high availability and security", explained Klimowicz. Unoptimized infrastructure costs were another major concern, making it essential to find a cost-effective approach without sacrificing performance.
“Modernizing our enterprise system felt like wrestling a stubborn beast. We couldn't find a good solution until we discovered Control Plane.”
Simplified Deployment and Management
Control Plane provided PrimeRx with the sought-after "PaaS" experience, blending ease of use, efficiency and reliability. Klimowicz notes, "Control Plane makes it very easy to deploy containers into a Kubernetes-like environment, with all the benefits and none of the pain." This enabled PrimeRx to extract key business logic from their core platform and centralize it, improving time-to-market and agility. By eliminating system dependencies, PrimeRx could iterate faster and develop reusable services that seamlessly integrated across multiple products.
Seamless Integration and Enhanced Monitoring
Control Plane's compatibility with PrimeRx's preferred Infrastructure-as-Code tool, Terraform, ensured a smooth transition. Easy integration with Datadog enhanced infrastructure monitoring capabilities, providing PrimeRx with comprehensive system oversight. By leveraging these tools, PrimeRx could better optimize performance while maintaining critical service uptime.
Launching PrimeRx CLOUD
Control Plane was instrumental in supporting the launch of PrimeRx CLOUD, a comprehensive cloud-based solution for community pharmacies. This new platform offers advanced features such as remote access to records and workflows, SMS support for electronic prescriptions, and mobile payments, all while ensuring compliance and operational excellence. With a flexible architecture now in place, PrimeRx can rapidly deploy new features without re-engineering core components, further reducing development time and costs.
Driving Business Expansion
With the successful launch of PrimeRx CLOUD, the company not only enhanced the experience for existing customers but also positioned itself for significant growth. PrimeRx plans to rapidly grow their cloud customer base over the coming months, leveraging the efficiency of shared services and scalable cloud infrastructure provided by Control Plane
Empowering Team Growth and Evolution
The efficiency gained through Control Plane allowed Klimowicz to step up to a director role, overseeing development of PrimeRx CLOUD. The ease of use and comprehensive features of Control Plane facilitated smooth knowledge transfer within the team. "By centralizing business logic and leveraging a microservices architecture, we've significantly reduced complexity, allowing our team to focus on innovation."
“Control Plane makes it very easy to deploy containers into a Kubernetes-like environment, with all the benefits and none of the pain.”
Transitioning from enterprise systems to cloud-native architecture presented challenges due to compatibility issues and cost management concerns. Control Plane ultimately empowered PrimeRx to embrace cloud-native solutions, leading to the launch of the PrimeRx CLOUD platform, a key driver of their ongoing organizational growth.