Though it's a small organization, the Minnesota Board of Animal Health (BAH) plays an important role in keeping Minnesota's food supply safe. BAH protects the food supply in Minnesota by monitoring the health of Minnesota livestock. The Minnesota BAH partnered with the US Department of Agriculture and similar state organizations to launch an SaaS contract with CoreOne, a disease surveillance application developed by a company in Northern Ireland.

For the past 15 years, BAH has used a generic Oracle client/server database, but maintenance and support costs rose dramatically as the database became too large for the generic system to manage. BAH sought to replace the existing generic database with an SaaS livestock disease surveillance system that would reduce support costs, allow remote access and mobile functionality, enhance business continuity, and automate data uploads from remote livestock sites.

CoreOne uses Linux Red Hat application server, Apache front end load processor, MySQL database with a Ruby on Rails framework. CoreOne uses open source technology as much as possible to keep costs down and take advantage of new, innovative technologies.The CoreOne application along with the MySQL data base tables are housed on State servers to protect data security and privacy.

With a little innovation and collaboration, even small agencies and boards like BAH can get access to a multi-million dollar application at a fraction of the cost. Livestock disease surveillance is a very specialized type of application that cannot be easily found. By collaborating with similar organizations and leveraging SaaS providers, Minnesota Board of Animal Health is protecting Minnesotans while saving taxpayers money.