Featured client stories | IBM and Red Hat

The goal Tennessee had was really to transform their service delivery. The Department of Human Services has roughly thirty-six-hundred employees and serves about two million Tennessee residents. KPMG and Red Hat together built the services layer for the Department of Human Services. We were like, in essence, the plumbing for the entire modernization effort.

So, during the pandemic, there was an increase of volume because the rules for distributing benefits were widened. And so not only did they have to implement the services faster, but they had to do it in volumes that were unprecedented. KPMG and Red Hat’s solution was integral to that because we were the middle part. We were the glue that binded all those module systems together.

KRIS is the KPMG Resource Integration Suite. So, it's a suite of products and the KRIS Connected platform is the channel or the method on which all systems integrate across the entire enterprise. So, an engagement layer, it could be back-end database, it could be program systems.

Red Hat technologies allow us to scale because it is highly performant software. The integration layer is micro-services based and it runs in containers and it's very fast. OpenShift provides a container platform that allows us to run it on any cloud, for any state agency.

We're also looking to expand the KRIS Connected Platform to other domains in state and local government, including transportation and finance. And there's also global applicability. We’ve just begun this journey with KRIS because we believe that the future is so bright. We are helping deliver services to the neediest population, people who need those services, they need health care, they need cash assistance, they need food assistance. And knowing that our platform is help-enabling-that is incredible for us.

There's such a tremendous need out there for people who are on Medicaid services, who need to have a way to access the services in a much more seamless manner with a better experience. So, our commitment, jointly with Red Hat is to provide that kind of a solution that makes it easier for them to access these services.

We looked at a lot of different, you know, cloud vendors out there, but what was particularly interesting to us was finding a partner who could be with us through the journey, from developing the solution, all the way to deploying the solution in a SaaS-based way. You know, leveraging, integration, cloud services, and data platforms that were out there.

As we looked at all the different cloud vendors, there wasn't a single vendor that came close to that hybrid cloud interoperability that Red Hat brought to us. A key item that was really important to us, was looking at vendors who didn't require it to be a proprietary solution. That's important because we'd be able to take this to many other different states, and also outside into the private sector as well. There was no question that Red Hat and OpenShift would be our provider of choice for this.

The KPMG Resource Integration Suite, which is KRIS for short, is a systems integration platform that actually leverages a number of Red Hat technologies to allow for new applications to be developed, deployed, integrated, and managed, much faster and in a much more consistent manner. At the heart of that extensibility really is the Red Hat OpenShift platform because it was all about, "How do I develop an application one time, and do so in a way that it can be deployed anywhere that I need it to be?" In the healthcare space, and especially when you're dealing with these types of Medicare and Medicaid applications, there's a ton of requirements around HIPAA compliance, around personal identifiable information, and how you maintain security around that, and that actually requires that you deploy your application in different ways, and in different areas. By developing this platform on the core of Red Hat OpenShift, it allows us with KPMG to develop that application one time and be able to deliver that application wherever it's needed.

The partnership is young, but we have done tremendous things, you know, as evidenced already with the KRIS Connected Solution. In our continued discussions with Red Hat, as we think about the future and the opportunity for us to extend this type of a solution and this type of scalability into other states to provide those services, that is what's important to KPMG and Red Hat together.