Insurance Company #3

The Client

With nearly 100,000 employees or agents working in approximately one thousand offices in North America, the company services almost 70 million individuals, providing health and accident coverage, life insurance, annuities, personal disability coverage, pension plans and brokerage services, mutual funds, and a wide range of employee benefit-related products and services. Agents must be able to securely access the system to provide quotes and manage services for existing accounts as well as support nearly $5 billion in annual sales.

The Engagement

Encode, working with IBM services team, provided System Architecture services to assist with the migration from a Microsoft/Intel based platform to an IBM WebSphere/AIX platform.

Critical Services Delivered

Encode participated in the "proof of concept" phase and helped develop the migration strategy. As their first step, Encode developed and installed a custom configuration management application, utilizing Java-J2EE, to track thousands of project applications and servers.

The Configuration Management application was originally estimated as a two-year effort by another vendor. However, Encode was able to successfully complete this aspect of the project within six months while utilizing the client's internal staff. This not only saved the client considerable time and money, but also served as the client's introduction to application programming in an IBM WebSphere/AIX environment using Java and J2EE.

• Architecture Design and Platform Migration
• Tool Development
• "Best Practices" Mentoring

Technology Used

The client selected IBM WebSphere Application Server, IBM MQ Series, IBM DB2, and associated products as its new large scale applications environment.

"Many organizations are migrating applications from Microsoft technologies like Visual Basic® and COM+ (Component Object Model) to J2EE™ for a variety of reasons. For some organizations, it's a matter of consolidating their investment on a standard enterprise platform. Others have realized that departmental applications they have developed using this technology just cannot scale to an enterprise level. WebSphere Application Server V5.1 supports the Java™ 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) specification. Microsoft's COM+ programming model does not conform to the J2EE (or any open) specification and so applications written to run in the Microsoft component services-based environment require extensive changes to run on WebSphere Application Server." (IBM*)

"It is easy to think of a migration in narrow terms, but it is dangerous to do so; application developers often tend to think of migration in terms of the application code, while administrators think of the production run time. Instead, migration should be thought of in broad terms." (IBM*)

*Copy which describes IBM products is adapted from the copy provided on the IBM website. Consult www.ibm.com for further information.