New Tech Extends Mainframe Uses

New Tech Extends Mainframe Uses

There is no doubt that its been a difficult year for insurance carriers. Many have experienced dwindling capacity, rising premiums for reinsurance, and an increase in the frequency and number of liability claims. Now add the prolonged stock market retraction and the ongoing risk of a terrorist attack, and youve got the makings of a tough environment.

While the economy as a whole has taken its knocks, this reality has not lessened the industrys need or desire to innovate. In most cases, innovation involves the implementation of new technologies. Whether it is customer relationship management (CRM), e-business or employee portal initiatives, insurance companies are under pressure to update their technology infrastructure in order to remain competitive.

While the inclination during tough economic times is to put a halt to new technology expenditures, many believe that it makes even more business sense to implement new technology initiatives.

With this reality in mind, insurance carriers and their IT departments are left trying to find the right balance between controlling costs and implementing new technologies. Hampering this delicate balance is the fact that the IT infrastructure of the majority of carriers is highly reliant on mainframe technology. As a result, the key to facilitating the successful implementation of these new technologies often involves increasing the speed and performance of mainframe applications.

In order to do this, carriers can turn to memory-resident table management technology. For over 20 years, table management technology has enabled carriers to maximize transaction volumes and support more end users, without involving the purchase of additional hardware resources.

Memory-resident table management architecture places mission-critical data in tables, where it can be more easily accessed, and then stores the tables in computer memory, instead of storing this information on diskthe more traditional manner of storage.

In computer programming, a table is a data structure used to organize information so that it can be accessed and worked with in appropriate ways. Memory-resident table management technology enables applications to access and update information much faster than accessing the same information from disk.

The result can be a dramatic increase in the performance of mainframe applications, an extension of the useful life of the mainframe system, and a reduction in overall maintenance and replacement costs. Because many new technology solutions involve an extremely high number of transactions, this architecture enables the legacy systems to better support new technology initiatives.

New applications like CRM, e-business and data mining typically result in a dramatic increase in the number of transactions that a companys IT infrastructure is expected to handle. Unfortunately, this volume of transactions exceeds the capacity that most mainframes were built to handle.

In order to enable these systems to better support new technology initiatives, IT departments can develop a memory-resident table management architecture to facilitate the processing of large volumes of datarapidly, in real-timewithout the need to extend or modify existing mainframe applications.

Since faster mainframe applications maximize transaction volumes, the increased speed translates into an increased bottom line by improving employee productivity and responsiveness to customer inquiries, and by allowing carriers to extend their operations to the Web.

While insurance carriers continue to struggle with finding the balance between the need to innovate and the need to cut expenditures, memory-resident table management is proving to be one solution that allows these organizations to achieve the best of both worlds.

Robert Koblovsky is vice president of Sales and Marketing for Data Kinetics (www.dkl.com), a developer of memory-resident, table management systems.

Reproduced from National Underwriter Property & Casualty/Risk & Benefits Management Edition, January 27, 2003. Copyright 2003 by The National Underwriter Company in the serial publication. All rights reserved.Copyright in this article as an independent work may be held by the author.