The Perfect Host

"We wanted to provide our insurance agents with a Web portal for the rapid quoting and purchase of our products and also give them the ability to service their clients better through online policy changes," says Saro Hamamah, manager of software development for CNI. "This type of portal would increase both the service capabilities for our agents as well as our revenues by expanding CNI products to more prospective clients."

To create this Web portal, though, CNI needed to overcome the legacy system challenge. The carrier discovered it was too costly and time-consuming to rewrite the applications or duplicate them on Web front ends. "It would create additional problems with data integrity and the effort needed for timely maintenance of rates and business logic," says Hamamah.

CNI discovered two noninvasive host integration solutions that promised a fast and easy way to expose data, business rules, and other functions in the carrier's legacy policy systems. During the three months of proof-of-concept tests, CNI found Attachmate's product, Verastream Host Integrator, gave the carrier superior results in compatibility and speed of process, reports Hamamah. "[Attachmate's] process models approach was easy to understand and to work with," he says. "Its presales team covered all of our questions and concerns quickly and competently and ultimately is the reason we chose Attachmate's Verastream solution."

Besides Hamamah, the selection team included Lou Balicki, vice president of information systems, and other senior software developers and business systems analysts.

The installation was straightforward, according to Hamamah. There were two separate installable modules: one for the server installation, and the other for the development installation. "The server module required a separate installation of Tomcat and Java Runtime, and the technical documentation was helpful in minimizing the need for installation training," he says.

CNI's experience with Verastream has been positive, attests Hamamah. After the initial training, the CNI technology staff dove into building models of a major line's quote and policy issuance modules. "As we built greater complexity of the screen flows, our procedures were growing very large," he says. "This caused a slowdown in development time. We contacted technical support, and it advised us to utilize Java 'event handlers.' Since we had limited Java expertise in our shop, we hired an Attachmate consultant to show us how to convert the complex Verastream Host Integrator modeling procedures into Java event handlers. The consultant worked with our developers, and it took only a few days to accomplish this task."

CNI's business strategy is to provide greater agency access to products, notes Hamamah. "Our first efforts have been focused on the personal lines with quote and purchase functions for homeowners, personal auto, and earthquake," he says. "We also have an agency Web application for our commercial auto line."

Balicki explains some of CNI's back-end applications are different for each line of business. "With the help of middleware and integration tools such as Verastream Host Integrator, we are able to give our agents one Web portal to access products for all lines of businesses," he says. "This has helped us meet our goal of quick time to market and ease of use across multiple products."

Execution of Verastream Host Integrator models on the carrier's servers is fast, asserts Hamamah. "If there is any bottleneck, more often it is with the host legacy application," he says. "To help minimize, we have modified our process to reduce the number of Verastream Host Integrator calls to the host application."

Hamamah believes this tool gave CNI a great alternative to rewriting legacy applications and replicating them for Web site use. "Rewriting would have taken many months, if not years, and replication of all the necessary rating modules, business rules, distribution processes, and workflow also would have been a major project," he says. "In addition, with replication, the maintenance of our rates and rules would likely be a greater, long-lasting headache."

Robert Regis Hyle