Case Study: Alight Solutions achieves 250x faster customer experience with MongoDB through mainframe offload and a single-view platform

How Alight Solutions Improved Customer Experience by over 250x with Mainframe Offload and Single View

Alight Solutions (formerly part of Aon PLC) is a leading provider of outsourced benefits administration and cloud HR/financial services, serving roughly 4 million employees. The company needed to unify customer data scattered across z/OS mainframe systems and cloud services to improve responsiveness, developer productivity and reduce rising mainframe MIPS costs. Existing queries to multiple backends caused 0.5–2 second latencies and scaling was difficult; a Hadoop-only approach could not meet the low-latency OLTP needs.

Alight built a Customer 360 single-view platform using MongoDB and Apache Kafka, first proving the concept with batch loads and then moving to real-time and batch pipelines that apply stronger MDM rules before loading documents into MongoDB and exposing them via REST. Aggregating each customer into a single document cut query latency from ~500 ms to under 2 ms (≈250x), reduced mainframe calls and peak costs, improved scalability and availability, and unlocked faster innovation; ongoing work adds benefit-class modeling and data versioning for greater flexibility.

Alight Solutions