Case Study:

Solcorp

1 March 2006

SolCorp, a wholly-owned subsidiary of EDS, provides software solutions and consulting services for the life insurance and wealth management industries.

SolCorp's solutions are designed to help their customers ? insurers with worldwide offices and high policy volumes ? reduce their administration costs. Ever conscious of its customers' pressures to respond to business quickly while reducing IT costs, SolCorp sought a way to improve the performance of their flagship product, Ingenium, and give customers the option of standardising on the low cost, high performance Windows platform suite, rather than having dedicated servers specifically for their policy administration systems.

Ingenium is a high-performance, Web services-enabled policy administration system that scales to high-volume environments, providing robust, full-function processing for an extensive range of life and investment products.

As a policy administration system that supports the entire lifecycle of a contract (from the acquisition of new business to final settlement), Ingenium contained over one million lines of proven Cobol and DB2 mainframe code. Although Ingenium was already running across multiple platforms, many customers felt Windows was enterprise-ready, and SolCorp responded by embarking with Micro Focus on a move to re-use, migrate and benchmark Ingenium on Windows and .NET using Net Express with .NET, one of the products within Micro Focus Studio, to optimise performance and scalability for deployment on Application Server.

The combination of the Lift and Shift and Leverage and Extend solutions from Micro Focus enabled SolCorp to provide customers the best of both worlds with Ingenium. It now runs in parallel on both the mainframe and in the Windows and Microsoft .NET environment.

Using Micro Focus Lift and Shift, SolCorp, Microsoft and Micro Focus moved the application from mainframe DB2 database architecture to a Micro Focus Server and Microsoft SQL Server architecture. With mainframe Cobol dialect support in Micro Focus Studio, the migration of the batch mainframe and DB2 to Windows and SQL Server involved changes to less than 100 of the one million lines of Cobol code, while the migration of a similarly sized online application to managed Cobol code running under the .NET Framework was achieved with changes to less than one per cent of the code. Using Micro Focus Leverage and Extend, SolCorp has been able to deliver a system that is agile with a high degree of interoperability with other systems, and integrate and extend Ingenium into the .NET Framework using Net Express with .NET to provide support for managed Cobol code. The open design of the new version of Ingenium, called Ingenium.NET, means that in addition to a Web interface, Cobol business functionality can be accessed through published APIs, Acord XML and Web services.

The migration of Ingenium online and batch processing to Windows and the .NET Framework using Micro Focus Studio and Server was completed with speed and success. Ingenium.NET was launched in spring 2005 and has delivered benefits in terms of lower operating costs, performance, scalability, agility and flexibility.

Windows hardware and software provides significant savings compared to the mainframe, enabling insurers to drastically reduce their initial hardware and software expenses and continue to enjoy lower costs going forward.

Ingenium.NET brings the same scalability that the system is known for on its Unix and mainframe platforms. Data access, which is critical to most Cobol business systems, was a key issue. SolCorp, Microsoft and Micro Focus worked closely on ensuring maximum performance and scalability for data access including optimising the behaviour of bulk Fetch/Insert SQL requests. The resulting improved performance delivers multiple benefits including a reduced batch window, improved resource utilisation and greater online availability.

Following successful benchmarking, Ingenium is now able to run an estimated 90 per cent of the North American life insurance market, reaching 2.1m policies on 12 CPU machines running Windows and positioned to exploit the capabilities of the Microsoft .NET Framework.

Blair Goulet, a senior vice president at SolCorp, says: "Micro Focus and Microsoft have helped us position Ingenium to a wider range of customers without sacrificing the security or scalability we enjoy on the mainframe version, which many of our customers continue to use. It truly is the best of both worlds.