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Faced with the challenge of keeping the core administration system for their civil insurance business up-to-date and within budgetary constraints, Interpolis determined that moving to Microsoft’s .NET Framework was the most efficient, secure and cost effective option. They selected NetCOBOL for .NET and Microsoft’s SQL Server as the best software to enable the move. Profile
Interpolis focuses on offering insurances, retirement plans, and social personnel management (helping companies improve staff health). Besides the Dutch market, Interpolis has operations in Ireland, Luxemburg and Portugal. In 2004 Interpolis had a turnover of 5 billion Euro and it employs around 6000 people. With a motto of being crystal clear, Interpolis offers a wide variety of damage and life insurances for both private and business markets. Interpolis has over one million private customers and several hundred thousand corporate customers, and is the most significant insurance company in the Netherlands. In particular Interpolis is the market leader in the agricultural sector – having grown out of mutual insurance companies established in the early 1900s to support the agricultural and market gardening communities. While crystal clarity is the vision for its customers, Interpolis has a “clear working” vision for its employees which encompasses three areas: * People and organization * Data management and information and communications technology * Business and work environment Having selected the right people, Interpolis endeavors to create
the appropriate physical and technological environments that encourage
them to behave as free and responsible entrepreneurs. For example,
technology should make it possible for employees to work at home,
at a client, while traveling, in fact just about anywhere. Problems
Interpolis had a large installed base of COBOL programs servicing hundreds of users and had well-established in-house knowledge of these applications. The applications were hosted on an IBM mainframe, using CICS for the online transactions, with IDMS as the primary database, supported by a significant number of batch programs. It was becoming increasingly clear that this environment was not providing the accessibility to modern technologies that Interpolis’ vision required nor was it conducive to rapid adaptions to emerging needs. Further, with a leader’s eye on costs, Interpolis
believed that the same or better performance could be achieved for
a fraction of the annual expense of maintaining the mainframe. Solution
Having studied various alternatives for renewing the mission critical software running on the mainframe computer system, Interpolis concluded that Microsoft .NET would be the most efficient, secure and cost effective path to follow. Fujitsu Software’s NetCOBOL for .NET made the environment particularly attractive as it allowed Interpolis to use the source code from its existing COBOL programs with only minor changes. Thus the transition could be made to the new platform while preserving the core business logic and the associated in-house knowledge. The new computer environment is based on Windows Server 2000 combined with a SQL Server 2000 database. NetCOBOL provides the support for the migrated COBOL applications and PowerBSORT is used for the sort/merge operations used intensively in the original application. Making It Happen
A proof-of-concept project (POC) was first set up that consisted of migrating the most processing-intensive batch job. After migration of that batch job the tests performed showed a capacity of processing 90,000 transactions per hour, with each transaction spanning an update of up to 8 database tables. This was an increase of performance of 30% compared to the mainframe environment! The migration was completed successfully in 2003.
Costs forecast and the timeline of the project were according to
plan. There was no loss of functionality whatsoever and stability
never was an issue. Total costs of ownership were reduced by 20%
the first year and all benefits of the dotnet environment are now
available. Benefits
Interpolis is realizing the following benefits
* Modern application architecture * Greater flexibility * Up to 30% better performance * 20% reduction in TCO in the first year For More Information
About Interpolis: www.interpolis.com
Fujitsu Software Corporation
1250 E. Arques Avenue Sunnyvale, CA 94085 Phone: (800) 545-6774 or (408)
428-0300 Email: cobol@netcobol.com Web: www.netcobol.com
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| © 2003 - 2006 Fujitsu Computer Systems Corporation. All Rights Reserved. |
