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Defining The Business Value Of Technology
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July 24, 2000 |
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Prudential Finds Integration Is Key To Success
Insurer uses Level 8 Systems middleware to give employees access to information
By Susan Breidenbach
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or a successful merger to produce a whole that's worth more than the sum of its parts, it's increasingly the role of information technology to work the mathematical magic. At Prudential Insurance Co. of America, rapid and effective enterprise application integration is key to the company's synergistic success.Three years ago, several acquisitions left Prudential with a checkerboard of new and legacy information systems, all of which needed to be quickly united into a single IT force. To achieve its "One Prudential" goal, the financial-services giant looked for a way to give employees, partners, and customers a consolidated view of its disparate information resources.
"We wanted to test-market a whole bunch of products and services in various U.S. markets, and we had to access data from different types of business systems spread across different areas of the company," says Jonathan Vaughan, VP of technology strategy and architecture for Prudential. "We were also implementing a Siebel sales-support system, and we needed to pull legacy data sources into the call-center application."
Using IBM's MQSeries messaging middleware, Prudential had built some internal messaging capabilities that allowed existing mainframe applications to share customer and product information with external applications. These messaging interfaces had to be integrated with the Siebel application.
The goal was to provide access across the entire company to complete customer and product information. Agents handling a certain group of products would be able to see and leverage customer relationships in other Prudential divisions and to exploit any cross-selling opportunities.
As part of the effort, 12,000 field agents received notebook computers that would deliver real-time customer and policy information. These road warriors often connect with dial-up modems, so establishing multiple connections to different back-end systems every time they call is impractical. The situation called for an intermediary server that would draw information from the patchwork of back-end systems and serve as a single point of reference for the mobile PCs.
Initially, Prudential developed a homegrown solution that handled protocol conversion and message formatting at the client level. PCs sent MQSeries messages to the back-office systems and got responses in the same format. But it was a complex approach: To ensure that users had to log on only once, Prudential deployed Open Database Connectivity drivers on each computer and automated the multiple sign-ons to all the different back-end databases.
"Our sales-automation and customer-relationship management software is just one of many applications on the notebooks," says Michael Mazick, a technical specialist at Prudential. "We were looking to use less client, not more, and the ODBC approach was going to take additional client resources." After evaluating several packaged middleware platforms, Prudential chose Level 8 Systems' Geneva Integration Broker, which has server and client editions. The client software is small enough to fit into the average notebook.
"Geneva is kind of a black box in the middle that can talk to the client and the data-source languages," says Mazick, who was in charge of the Geneva Integration Broker implementation. "It doesn't dictate the configuration of the notebook or require any changes on the back ends."
The source databases still use and recognize only their proprietary message formats, and the client architecture is greatly simplified. With Geneva Integration Broker handling all the schema and format conversion, the clients just need a standard Web browser that can send and receive messages in the Extensible Markup Language format. A single messaging stream provides a data-access conduit between the client applications and the enterprise data sources.
"Geneva Integration Broker can reach into various back-end applications and bring their data into a common data model," says Tom Dwyer, managing director of the Internet infrastructure practice at the Aberdeen Group. "It gathers and normalizes all the information about a particular customer, then presents a single, consistent view of that customer."
Photo by Gary Gelb
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