Be Consistent

Web services has been described as a lifesaver for businesses looking to integrate disparate systems, and Kansas City Life Insurance Co. felt adopting a Web services product would fulfill the carrier’s basic requirements. “We needed to make functionality available for the distributed side, and we needed to maintain and encapsulate much of the mainframe application code that existed from the distributed side,” says Les Freund, former CTO of Kansas City Life and currently an executive consultant for the carrier. “We needed both directions, and DataDirect was one of the few companies we looked at that provided this.”

In business terms, Kansas City Life believed it was necessary to provide agents and other sales reps with a consistent view of the carrier’s policy information, states Freund.