Accenture Transforms Blueriq’s Application Platform with Scalable Infrastructure on AWS

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Blueriq customers reported scalability issues as new use cases placed unprecedented demands on their systems. This included the rapid shift to support remote working, high demand for new and existing online services, and the need to quickly commission new infrastructure.

Yuri Versluis, strategic product manager at Blueriq, saw an opportunity to take Blueriq’s product strategy in a new direction. He wanted to make the Blueriq Platform available as a PaaS solution so customers could deploy new Blueriq-based applications in the cloud without running into scaling limitations or incurring on-premises hardware costs.

Another goal was to make the Blueriq Studio business process modeling environment available as a SaaS solution that could be continually improved with the latest innovations in the cloud. Versluis wanted to reduce the complexity of deploying large Blueriq applications and help customers speed up the time it took to identify a process for automation and to deploy a Blueriq application.

After a competitive tender, Blueriq chose Accenture Netherlands to rebuild its solutions on AWS. It also asked Accenture to help it develop generative AI capabilities into Blueriq Studio and deliver it as a software as a service (SaaS).

Accenture designed three types of Blueriq Platform PaaS landing zones with built-in security guardrails. These were designed to make it simpler for customers to securely launch and run their Blueriq applications on AWS. Built on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) and Amazon RDS for SQL Server infrastructure components, the Blueriq Platform PaaS is available in a dedicated environment for customers with high compliance requirements. Customers with lower requirements can also use it in semi-shared and fully shared environments.

Existing Blueriq on-premises software deployments, including those at several Dutch banks and defense organizations, are used to process healthcare, government, financial, and national security data. “Our customers have a lot of requirements for data security and encryption that they will ask for when we offer new products,” says Versluis. “The experience that Accenture brings to architecting a secure environment on AWS makes it possible for us to deliver our SaaS and PaaS solutions with confidence that we meet our customers’ security needs.”

Blueriq Platform PaaS landing zones are architected in accordance with Zero Trust principles, a modern approach to minimizing risks from insider and external threats. Accenture also used infrastructure as code (IaC) for deploying and managing Blueriq’s AWS environment. This was required to automate the provisioning of infrastructure component resources and help minimize the risk of human error.

“We wanted to make it easier for customers to deploy high-load Blueriq applications and simplify the task of managing complex configurations,” Versluis says. “Customers shouldn’t have to invest in their own new infrastructure for high-load moments only to be left with equipment they don’t need anymore. When there is a peak, you use it, and when demand falls, you scale down.”

Thanks to Accenture’s well-architected environments for Blueriq on AWS, Blueriq can give its customers the assurance that its solutions can meet high security requirements. Versluis says the company is forecasting a significant increase in sales because of the PaaS solution, which it is already offering to customers. “We see an increase in our sales pipeline of about 30 percent because we have this cloud proposition,” says Versluis.

The SaaS Blueriq Studio solution enables the company to update and improve its product faster and will halve the time between process modeling and application deployment compared to the on-premises solution. “When we have a sales proposal, it’s going to be a lot easier for us to respond,” says Versluis. “We have already identified over 30 use cases to make engineering business processes in the SaaS Blueriq Studio much easier and much faster. We can decrease the time to market for customers by 50 percent and make it easier for customers to create innovative solutions.”