InformationWeek

That was the challenge faced by Royal & SunAlliance Financial, a life-insurance and investment funds company in Oakville, Ontario. The company had two large mainframe-based databases with information on its clients, but the systems couldn't be cross-referenced. If a change had to be made to the personal information in a customer's life-insurance policy file, for example, it also had to be made to any files in the other database.

Royal & SunAlliance had two choices: convert all the data to one system and run it all on a single mainframe, or create an interface to connect the two systems. It chose the cross-database route and used DWL Inc.'s Unifi software--which builds interfaces across multiple databases--to do the job.

Darin Stahl, Sun & RoyalAlliance's CIO, says it would have taken 18 months to convert and remap the company's data. With Unifi, the process took about one-third that long. "From when we finalized the contract to when they delivered the system was six to seven months," he says.

Sun & RoyalAlliance isn't alone. Many insurance companies that offer customers life, health, and home-owners insurance, as well as financial services such as investments and equities, have separate databases for each service--and require separate log-ins for each by customer-service representatives. Forget about granting customers access from the Web--these companies are lucky if they can get the right information to the right reps at the right time, regardless of how they enter the system.

While there are a growing number of options for bringing mainframe data to the Web, reaching across different customer databases continues to be a problem. DWL, a developer of Web connectivity software, recognized this issue four years ago and built a solution to the two problems--data cross-referencing and Internet access--in one application.

The Toronto software vendor was established in 1996 by former professional hockey player Justin LaFayette (see sidebar story, "DWL's LaFayette Finds A New Kind Of Challenge"). Unifi, DWL's flagship product, was released at the end of 1996. The software gives customer-service reps a complete picture of all a customer's activity--so reps in the life-insurance division, for example, know if customers also have car or home loans with the company.

Gartner Group senior research analyst Kimberly Harris says DWL's is a unique product that's needed by companies with a variety of services, such as insurance firms. Unifi is built on Microsoft's Component Object Model and DCOM and Sun Microsystems' Enterprise JavaBeans, giving users the option of running the software on Unix or Windows NT. It uses IBM's MQSeries to connect to all a company's legacy mainframe systems, then transforms the data and presents it to a Web browser in HTML format. Unifi has drivers to connect to databases running on IMS, CICS, VAX, client-server, and AS/400 systems.

Companies that use Unifi can leave their existing databases intact. All that's required is building a connection to the data repository Unifi runs on. This lets DWL's customers roll out a Web interface to their legacy systems much faster than if they wrote the interface by hand. "We did in six months what consulting companies needed a year or two to do," says Mike Tahan, CIO for National Life Group, a life-insurance company in Montpelier, Vt. The company has rolled out services for agents, such as policy and commission information and state forms. Eventually, it will let customers access their accounts, too.

"If we'd built this site without the Unifi tools, each product we'd brought to the marketplace would have been an extremely costly affair," says Vince Berretta, president of iNet-Fi Inc., a Toronto company that's setting up a marketplace hub for insurance companies. "Now it's around one-tenth the cost to a company to set them up. We can bring a customer online in one or two days instead of 10."

Complementing Unifi is Identifi, a CRM package that retrieves information from databases via Unifi, then lets customers or agents make modifications to personal information, policy information, and other data in real time. Because it uses Unifi to span multiple databases in-house, Identifi can also be used to cross-reference customers so they can be sold services they don't have.

Unifi's Internet access gives users a less-expensive means of accessing data. Most insurance agents in remote offices can only access their databases via a proprietary system and dedicated lines. With DWL's tool, companies can replace that with PCs, a Web browser, and a virtual private network-protected Internet connection.

"Prior to rolling out Unifi, we communicated through old hardwired technology across leased lines and terminal screens with special codes that require a lot of training," says Clive Smith, president and CEO of Royal & SunAlliance. "As part of this project, they developed a front end that was easy for users and required no training." It also offers much greater scalability. "With the old technology, we could roll out only a limited number of lines to the offices," Smith says. "With this technology, the number of users is limitless. So it's really extending the boundaries of what we can do." The old infrastructure cost about $40,000 per year to support, whereas the new system, which requires an Internet server, routers, and an ISDN line, costs about $12,000 per year, CIO Stahl says.

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