Case Study:

Manulife Financial migrates to Microsoft

1 March 2006

Canadian Pension Operations, the retirement savings arm of Manulife Financial, runs a database system that supports the organisation's administration system, the Money Product System, which provides services that are critical to the 4,000 plan administrators and 300,000 members.

The Money Product System was running on HP hardware, a Unix operating system with a Sybase database application. As part of a review of technology spending, Canadian Pension Operations immediately identified migration to a new platform as a way they could achieve significant cost savings.

Manulife built a business case around the proven and verifiable performance of a Microsoft-based solution running Intel on an Intel processor, recognising this fast and highly scalable solution presented a significantly lower total cost of ownership than the existing technology.

Following a successful pilot, Manulife decided to implement a solution consisting of three Intel servers running Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server operating system and SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition. A small team of technical personnel consisting of two database administrators and three programmers managed the entire implementation and migration over a six-month period.

Following the successful implementation of SQL Server as the foundation for the Money Product System, Manulife's Canadian Pension Operations achieved significant cost savings, performance gains and a reduction in the amount of administration required to maintain the system.

Going into the project, the key driver for Manulife was to reduce overall IT spending related to database software as well as hardware and the operating system required to run the system.

"The migration was the right choice for us in terms of achieving our business goals," says Bill Laskey, director of Canadian Pension Operations' Information Services Group. "The reduction in our overall IT investment and ongoing maintenance expenses is very exciting. It is worth noting that nothing was sacrificed in the process. In fact, we've made significant performance gains that convert to greater business agility for Manulife."

Since completing the migration, Manulife has experienced significant increases in performance and efficiency. The dramatic improvement in performance has enabled the company to conduct routine tasks during the day without impacting the speed at which transactions are processed for customers.

"With SQL Server, our response times are faster," says Myles MacInnes, lead architect and project manager for Manulife Financial Canadian Pension Operations. "Month-end processes that used to take over 20 hours are now down to 10 hours. Now we run those same processes throughout the day and no one knows we're doing it."

The Microsoft-based solution has enabled Manulife to reduce administration time and improve the productivity of its database administrators (DBAs). By automating routine tasks using SQL Server, Manulife's DBAs have more time to spend on high-level activities, such as performance and tuning, adding greater value to the Money Product System and allowing Manulife to better serve its customers.

The successful implementation of SQL Server has motivated other business units within Manulife to migrate to the platform.

The Microsoft-based platform now serves as the foundation for a three-year plan for Manulife Financial's Canadian Pension Operations. They plan to leverage built-in business intelligence capabilities of SQL Server and they are also examining other Microsoft-based solutions for future projects.

"We are planning to harness the power of business intelligence using Microsoft Office," says Laskey. "This will be a significant leap forward for Manulife as it will completely change how management accesses and examines information in the database. The end result will be a greater level of visibility into our business and a higher level of agility which converts into competitive advantage for us over the long term."

"We are committed to providing our customers with the best service possible," says MacInnes. "I am confident that with our migration to the Microsoft-based platform, we now have the tools and capacity to offer new products while continuing to provide our customers with a high level of support and service for years to come."