Big Investment Although a company starting today could bypass some of the early adopter expenses Winterthur faced, the price for such a move remains steep. Although neither Winterthur nor Iona would discuss costs, Pezzini says similar efforts by European financial services companies cost around $US100 million. And while the operational savings and increased revenue from being able to sell new products more quickly will eventually pay back that investment, such an up-front cost "requires business management commitment, to say the least", Pezzini says.

For its part, Winterthur didn't approach the project with a specific ROI, although Daniel Lisetto, Winterthur's e-Platform Solutions Centre vice president, estimates an ROI of 15 per cent to 20 per cent per year, which Pezzini calls reasonable for an early adopter. When it started the effort in 1997, Winterthur simply believed the architectural approach would allow faster deployment of new applications, which is key in an industry such as financial services where companies succeed by quickly repackaging products into new variations, says Pezzini. "The ability to reuse the existing assets and to be able to deploy projects based on more modern technologies is key to us," says Winterthur CIO Martin Frick.

"It makes sense to develop one application for all market units to rationalise IT operations," adds Lisetto. "This reduces the cost of deploying common applications and brings all information to the front office [at brokers, internal departments and clients]."

The Transition Now Winterthur is eyeing the next step: modern Web services based on today's standards, which would let even more customers, brokers and staff connect to its systems. That would increase self-service opportunities that in turn could save Winterthur money and speed up processing. And Winterthur's transition to modern Web services will be relatively easy, says Gartner's Pezzini, because the company has already divided application logic from presentation and connectivity.

A few more steps remain, however. The current platform requires client software and thus restricts usage to those connected to the Winterthur network. Users must also access applications separately. At some point, however, Aumont says he hopes to deploy a portal to provide single-point access to many applications. And by the end of the year, he plans to integrate the platform applications with enterprise applications such as SAP.

Still, many implementation challenges remain, Aumont says. "The biggest challenge is security", including authentication and authorisation, he notes. "You need to spend 15 per cent of your time on security in an integration effort. We need standards to reduce that." Winterthur's current platform integrates different security models and propagates the information among various systems, Aumont says. But for Web services, he wants a single security model. Unfortunately, such a security standard doesn't exist yet, so he plans to deploy Web services slowly, perhaps implementing limited services as appropriate security components become available.

Belief in the Model Winterthur believes the platform provides a key competitive advantage: agility. "Winterthur can change business practices faster than other competitors in the market," Lisetto says. "We can convert different services as needed for business reasons." Aumont concurs: In the Swiss unit, "we now have 30 applications based on the same infrastructure, the same frameworks, the same security." Under the new platform, "when you have to maintain it, it's easy. In the traditional model, you have to change every application. It's not very economical," he says. For example, adding a new type of insurance option previously required updates to each insurance application. Under the new platform, only the insurance business-logic and forms-presentation modules need to be changed.

For CIO Frick, the new platform is a major vehicle for Winterthur's IT efforts going forward. "The platform is one of the most successful pan-European initiatives in the Insurance and Life & Pension divisions. There is a huge chance for us to bring together our vast pool of IT resources in the various market units and start thinking about intelligent ways to use those resources across the borders of the market units. Too long we have reinvented wheels in parallel with no, or only little, synchronisation between various countries."

With the common platform and its service architecture in place, Winterthur expects to use those resources to better compete in a Web-oriented world.