CASE STUDY | EARLY ADOPTER

SIDEBAR: Getting Ready for Web Services

Winterthur Insurance's Internet-era experiments produce a low-cost application platform

Switzerland's winterthur Insurance and Life & Pension knew in 1997 that it needed to replace its IBM OS/390-based application platform for new applications and some existing ones. Universities had stopped teaching the system, therefore making it increasingly expensive to hire development and maintenance staff. But what to replace it all with?

At the time, the IT industry was focused on Internet technologies - unproven and novel as they were - which led Winterthur's Credit Suisse Group subsidiary to look into the available tools. That investigation revealed that Java and other standards-based technologies could best support the development of new applications - and offered the potential to make those applications more easily accessible outside headquarters to other Winterthur offices, insurance and pension brokers, and client companies. As a result, Winterthur began developing Web services before Web services was even conceived," says Massimo Pezzini, vice president and research director of application integration and middleware strategies for Gartner (US).

Today, Winterthur has standardised its Swiss operations on its new platform and is rolling it out globally. Like modern Web services, the platform's application infrastructure relies heavily on reusable application components connected through a standard messaging and interface platform. The difference is that Winterthur had to do much of the heavy lifting that standard platforms built around Microsoft's .Net and Sun's Java provide today because those technologies inevitably need to integrate into the existing environment.

Despite the hurdles, Winterthur's Swiss division has ported 30 applications, and more are on the way in divisions throughout Europe. Client-oriented applications include online quotation, risk management assessment, claims reporting and customer data updating, while internal users can access applications for data warehouse-based marketing campaign management, financial analysis and reporting, and health insurance bill processing and verification. Java supports the application environment, and the Object Management Group's common object request broker architecture (Corba) provides the communications method.

Building Blocks Winterthur had used its existing IBM OS/390 platform and other IBM hardware for years. "But it was not scalable. It was complex, not easily distributed and required too much logic on the client side," says Eric Aumont, the engineering vice president who led the new platform development. To resolve those issues, the IT staff looked at Corba to be the exchange mechanism between its OS/390, database, content management and ERP systems with Java-based clients. "But Corba was too risky in 1997," Aumont says, since the standard was still evolving and did not yet support the PL/I mainframe programming language.

By mid-1998, however, Winterthur had settled on a mix of a now-improved Corba, client-side Java and server-side C++. "Java was not scalable enough from the server side," Aumont says, so Winterthur needed Corba as "a message broker to coordinate all these things". Being an IBM shop, Winterthur considered IBM's Object Broker as well, but it was not yet production-ready, so Winterthur chose the available alternative, Iona's Corba platform. Towards the end of the year, Aumont's team of five had ported the first application - one that let client HR departments directly manage changes to pension plans - to the new platform.

But that port was "on an easy platform - three or four machines," Aumont recalls. And Winterthur still couldn't rely on Corba to connect clients to a mainframe. Winterthur and its vendors had to work hard to make the technologies work together reliably, recalls Aumont and Iona Technologies CTO Eric Newcomer.

Those efforts let Winterthur get serious about implementing the Java and Corba technologies broadly in the organisation. The ability to broker messages from OS/390 applications meant that Winterthur could have all its applications - new and legacy - connected through the Iona platform. That was the key for the company to ultimately be able to offer its service-oriented architecture.

Winterthur will eventually replace many of its OS/390-based Cobol and PL/I applications. In fact, such a migration was a big focus in 2002, with three applications ported in Switzerland that year. The migration team has also grown, from the five in 1997 to about 30 today.

Throughout the migration effort, the team reused the business logic from 30 years of OS/390 applications. Ironically, the new services platform helps extend the life of the mainframe, says Gartner's Pezzini, since it makes the mainframe's applications and business logic reusable just like any other platform component.

Java Lab Because Winterthur started its effort in 1997, it had to test and help vendors fix technologies still under development. "It was essentially a laboratory to architect Java and the Internet," recalls Aumont.

While beginning early let Winterthur get the service platform running before many of its competitors, that fast start also created a complex technology legacy that companies today could avoid. For example, in early 2000, Winterthur's engineers were exploring enterprise Java beans (EJB) to manage components and provide standard services such as security in enterprise-class applications. But EJB resulted in "lots of problems with distributed storage, security, scalability, failover, resources, load balancing and response time," Aumont recalls. Also at first, platform provider Iona's EJB tools were incompatible with C++, "so we had a parallel operation of Java with EJB and C++ on the server side", says Aumont. In the end, Winterthur's Corba-Java combination resulted in a "very complex architecture", notes analyst Pezzini, one that today could be avoided with a pure Java or wholly Microsoft .Net approach.