Would it surprise you that one of the biggest open-source software shops in the world, in fact one of the biggest NoSQL shops in the world, resides in the U.S. government?
The Department of Veteran Affairs has more than 20 million primary customers and a $3.4B annual IT budget with 400,000 users and over 5,000 applications. The VA turned to MongoDB to unlock enterprise services with a schema agnostic enterprise CRUD (eCRUD) service.
Previously, the VA was paying millions of dollars to lock away data in relational databases and millions more to get it back out.
“It just didn’t make sense,” said Joe Paiva, Chief Technology Strategist at the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs. “We realized early on we could never build all the apps that people want. We wanted to go from wire frame to app much, much faster.”
In order to get there, the VA used MongoDB as one logical, federated data store for all of its different types of data. Now, people can freely code as long as they know how to do an AJAX web services call.
“You can say you’re agile, that you’re incremental, but when you need change, you need all the change!" said Paiva.
With MongoDB, they achieved just that. The VA had the first version of the service up in running in weeks. “It was that fast,” said Paiva.
Through this effort, the VA has been able to provide efficiency and enhanced information agility. Plus, it has increased security by consolidating data under standardized enterprise controls… all in the name of keeping costs low while better serving a greater number of veterans.
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