Our client is a leading insurance company based in the United State. It provides more than 16 million home, auto, business and life insurance policies to nearly 9 million households. It accomplishes this through a network of 15,000 agents, independent contractors and employees.

Our client has the largest DB2 database in United States, with about 15 terabytes of data supporting insurance policy administration and billing applications for various life & property and casualty lines of business. The huge volumes of data storage requirements coupled with an ever increasing growth in transactions and batch processing needed was resulting in performance issues in business applications accessing this information. According to a study done by Ernst & Young, growth was expected in the range of 22% (MIPS) on processing and 40% on database size resulting in possible collapse of the systems in an year’s time.

A critical need was felt to set up a system to provide for archival, purging and retrieval of the database for stabilizing data growth and reducing the impact on application performance.

The objective was to stabilize data growth in the client’s mainline business applications thereby reducing the performance degradation.

Since multiple policy processing and billing applications for auto and fire insurance would get affected as a result of the intended approach, Wipro re engineered these applications for smooth operations and transition. Also fresh programs/utilities were written to archive/purge data from production as well as archive databases.

Thorough analysis was done to ensure that the overall strategy addresses most of the complications of the data, the applications, and the interfacing of the applications.

Wipro’s solution integrated the user’s requirement for the systems to keep two years of data in production, and accordingly the basic solution was framed to archive data that is more than two years old, based upon the effective date on the data. It also ensured point-in-time retrieval of data from either production or archive.

Wipro undertook the complete design, construction, testing, and implementation of archive and purge functionality. The complete execution of the project will be done from offshore through Wipro’s development centers.

Subsequently, the regular maintenance of archive/purge and retrieval functionality’s, post implementation will be undertaken by Wipro, through the offshore development center setup for the client in India.

The execution of the project involved multiple challenges for Wipro yet it was made sure that the clients operations run smoothly and the projects get completed within time and budget. Some of the benefits that Wipro was able to provide to the client were

Managing Project Complexity: The client has a large and complex CICS environment based systems, as also the systems are complicated. With a restricted batch window and the need to contain the impact to current production applications and users at a minimum, is in itself a major challenge.

Benchmarking: Performance Benchmarking and impact on systems and users needed to be analyzed. Wipro set up a process and metrics for benchmarking of the performance. The benchmarking also ensured that not only our clients objective of prevention of deterioration was met but the actual performance also increased.

Earlier failures: The project was cancelled earlier on three attempts (by other vendors) resulting in failure while Wipro met the intended results

Availability of resources: The technologies involved were legacy mainframe based, and while our client had a constraint on internal resources, Wipro was able to pull in the required expertise rapidly.