Building for the Future - Integrating the Enterprise
Project Description
Provide an SOA-based connectivity architecture using WebSphere Process Server, WebSphere Partner Gateway and WebSphere Integration Developer
Business Needs
- An IT infrastructure that can take the business forward
- Automate manual processes
- Integrate many disparate packages and projects
BUSINESS PROBLEM
One of the largest property-casualty insurers required an IT infrastructure that would take the business forward, automating manual processes and integrating their many disparate packages and projects. They owned a myriad of applications covering only 40% of their business needs; the remaining 60% of their needs were being processed manually or were not optimized. Each of the company’s lines of business would purchase their own strategic packaged applications or custom-built solutions such as Claims Management and Policy Management without conforming to a corporate standard. The resulting IT infrastructure was therefore fragmented with 90% of the applications residing on the mainframe, as well as other platforms and environments such as Microsoft .NET and BEA WebLogic. Additionally the IT department found themselves being forced to integrate and manage all of these applications, as well as coordinate around 100 simultaneous development projects.
SOLUTION
A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to provide a connectivity infrastructure for integrating the organization’s many applications. Requirements included policy search and retrieval, database integration, transactional capabilities, security, email alerts, data transformation and backup, recovery and audit processes. Additional valuable attributes included a workflow with human tasks and providing customizable business rules. With the individual business units purchasing packaged applications it became critical for IT to have an Enterprise Services Bus to efficiently glue all of these applications and connect them to the legacy world, including CICS-based transactions, Microsoft .NET Web services, BEA WebLogic Web services, Apache Web services, SQL Server database stored procedures and an Outlook Exchange mail server. The SOA solution provided business analysts a way to maximize processes and business resource re-use; an easy-to-use integration to simplify and speed the assembly of composite applications; and flexible deployment of business processes making plug-and-play of components a reality. The SOA solution also allowed the ability to initially connect to 6-7 partners and expand to 30 partners by the end of year one – enabling the business to grow.
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