From what I've been seeing in recent years, the insurance industry has been doing a pretty good job with service-oriented architecture. With a large legacy install base (
However, these systems were originally designed for internal use by maybe a few hundred employees, and not built for relentless pounding by thousands of outside users. These systems need to be brought up to speed—literally—to handle transactions in a Web-based, service-oriented setting. Such was the experience with
The insurer moved its car insurance quoting process from a call center model to a SOA-based Web application. The SOA runs a variety of applications types, including .NET and Java, and currently supports about 25 different Web services.
As with all SOA projects, the effort unveiled shortcomings in the existing infrastructure, including application performance not up to the company's standards. The challenge was to be able to monitor the performance of applications that are taking on the new workloads arising from SOA. An application performance management system was required.
For a company that relies heavily on online consumer engagement, such as SafeAuto, robust application uptime and performance means the difference been competitive edge and sure trouble. Last fall, I conducted a survey in partnership with Unisphere Media/ITI among members of the
For insurers relying more and more on online business, that's a data point worth keeping in mind as new services are designed.
Joe McKendrick is an author, consultant, blogger and frequent INN contributor specializing in information technology.
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