Spanish insurance company implements CA`s Endevor

Computer Associates International, Inc (CA) has announced that Winterthur Spain (Winterthur), one of the leading insurance companies in Spain, is using CA`s Endevor to optimise the quality of its e-business systems and eliminate costly programming errors.

Winterthur manages 24 million lines of code and 27 000 programs. As new e-business initiatives are placing greater pressure on its programming staff to quickly execute new development projects and updates to existing applications, Endevor is ensuring that the company`s critical programming standards and processes are consistently followed.

"It is simply not feasible to manage our increasingly high-volume application environment without a management tool as robust as Endevor," said Jos'e Grima, IT architecture manager, Winterthur. "To move forward with all of our current development projects at the same pace, it is absolutely necessary to put them under one change management solution, and Endevor enables us to do that."

Winterthur applications cover all aspects of the company`s business, from insurance-specific applications for accidents, policies and underwriting, to enterprise applications such as accounting and payroll. Endevor automatically handles all code changes and allows for a program`s smooth transfer from development to production, ensuring that nothing is lost along the way.

"Endevor enables us to manage the coding efforts of hundreds of internal and external developers while maintaining the development security and consistency that is critical to the integrity of our environment," said Grima. "This is very important to us because many applications are shared by four Winterthur development groups and there is just no room for error."

Winterthur expects the euro conversion to impact a great part of their business applications and is using Endevor to deploy a complex, automated testing environment without disrupting existing business operations. Out of the whole set of Winterthur applications, approximately 20 000 programs, and 18 millions of code lines have been managed by Endevor in the euro conversion project.

"By implementing automated testing procedures with Endevor, we can fully test the impact of the euro conversion throughout our environment with minimal overhead cost," said Agust'in Bard'es, development project manager, Winterthur.

"As software becomes more complex and increasingly critical to every aspect of business, the ability to effectively manage huge amounts of code has become a competitive advantage for companies like Winterthur," said Anthony Becerra, sales manager, information management, CA Spain. "Endevor is a proven solution for achieving this essential management capability, and is indispensable for any organization that wants to maintain the quality of its e-business systems as the volume and extent of code reaches such staggering proportions."