Heritage, an independent insurance broker, has replaced Pick`s MVBase with IBM`s UniVerse database in a bid to drive down annual licensing costs. As a consequence, it has halved its annual licence renewal fee for MVBase.
Pick`s MVBase had been due for a licence renewal that would cost Heritage R120 000. "It took our breath away," says Ronald Gordon, chief executive of Heritage. "At the time we were happy with the product but we were unhappy with the cost of the licence renewal compared with the potential benefits we would receive."
That motivated Gordon and his director of IT, Mohamed Ahomed, to go shopping for an alternative. "That was when we discovered that a respected peer in the insurance market was making good use of UniVerse, showing us that it could meet our needs," says Gordon.
Before Gordon and Ahomed made the final decision to implement, however, they wanted to ensure UniVerse would seamlessly integrate with their existing systems. They were cautious as their group supplies long-term and short-term insurance, risk management, risk financing, employee benefits and medical expenses services to over 75 000 customers.
They contracted with Global Technology`s U2 DB&T (database and tools) division, which ran a pilot project to demonstrate the IBM product`s capabilities. U2 DB&T is an outsourced services division for IBM Data Management Division SA, offering consulting, training and support services around the IBM U2 product suite, and works very closely with both the local and international IBM offices.
Heritage`s core processes were replicated at Global Technology`s offices and the system ran smoothly. "It convinced them the migration was possible and that the business processes would remain intact using UniVerse," says Dereck Gibbs, director of Global Technology Services.
Once U2 DB&T had proved the conversion was achievable, Heritage was committed to the process of substituting its database with UniVerse. The data, including policy and personal information, was successfully migrated to UniVerse from MVBase. "It took a weekend for us to migrate the data and there were no major software problems, although we had to upgrade the firmware in our 80 dumb terminals," says Ahomed.
UniVerse is standards-compliant and provides data access storage and management capabilities across Windows NT and Unix, including Linux. At Heritage it operates in a Windows NT 4.0 environment on Compaq hardware. A relatively small 10GB of data was migrated in total, representing all transactions for Heritage since its inception in 1987. "We need to be very efficient with our data storage because we have 80 people pumping information into the system every day," says Gordon.
UniVerse has now allowed Heritage to plot a course for the Web. "We are giving our clients total read-only access to their policy information online," says Ahomed. "The primary reason for our online strategy is to provide a better service to our clients. The number of queries per client per year is increasing and the ability to access that information online has now made the process far smoother for our clients," adds Gordon.
The online strategy may possibly expand in the near future to allow additional applications online. Heritage is considering incorporating some WAP functionality at a later stage, or to make use of SMS. "If it can streamline the process of dealing with our customers, we will consider it," he concludes.
IBM UniVerse, formerly owned by Informix before its acquisition by IBM, is an extended relational database that offers a high-performance, scalable data management environment for embedding in vertical applications, and is the leading database in the MultiValue database market.
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