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 Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner.

Today, Winterthur has standardized 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. In the fall, 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.