<<Flexibility often equals opportunity in today's business climate. So
Vital Forsikring ASA, Norway's largest life and pensions insurance
company, turned to Web services and an SOA to capitalize on an
opportunity created by new pension legislation in that country.
Vital Forsikring, headquartered in Oslo, serves the life and pension
insurance needs of more than 6,800 corporate clients and 700,000
individual customers and has annual revenues of $27 million. It is a
subsidiary of DnB NOR, Norway's largest financial services group.
The legislation, requiring every employee to have a pension savings
plan, "made an opening for selling new pension products," said Rolf
Nergaard, enterprise architect for Vital Forsikring. "We wanted to use
an SOA because of flexibility and cost reduction. The market is
changing rapidly in our area, which is why we need to be able to
change our IT systems very fast. So flexibility is important."
That's why Vital decided to implement its new core pension system on
an SOA. Vital's SOA deployment is based on Microsoft .NET 2.0 and
includes BizTalk Server, Microsoft Operations Manager 2005 (MOM) and
the SOA Management system from AmberPoint Inc.
The core pension system is able to access and integrate a variety of
mainframe-based customer systems. Internal users can access the system
through either a Web portal or Windows client. Nergaard said the
pension system utilizes two abstraction levels: A high-level service
(process service), which calls a low-level service (business service).
"The business service maybe calls a mainframe system or an internal
.NET implementation," he said. "The change will be reflected in the
mainframe system. We hide the complexity of the different mainframe
systems."
Although the company has a variety of platforms, .NET is the main
platform. Vital starting working with the .NET 2.0 beta version last
summer. Microsoft does not have an ESB per se, but using Microsoft
BizTalk Server for orchestration and the Microsoft Enterprise Library,
"we put together what you could call an enterprise service bus,"
Nergaard said.
The SOA does not include a UDDI registry at present and he is not sure
if the company will go in that direction, but Vital was in the process
of implementing a repository from LogicLibrary Inc.
Vital is using the AmberPoint SOA Management System for exception
handling, service-level management, security and service network
monitoring capabilities, Nergaard said. And because AmberPoint
integrates with Microsoft, Vital can extend its SOA monitoring and
management capabilities to MOM. "We wanted to have something to help
us mange the increasing complexity of services. As the number of
services increased, complexity is also increasing. AmberPoint also had
close relationship with Microsoft. It was an advantage, since we're
using a lot of Microsoft products."
In developing the pension system, security was also a concern.
Although the company had been working with Web services prior to this
system, it was mainly doing so internally and was not exposing Web
services to external partners, he said. Security is a challenge
because the insurance company maintains personal information about
individuals, such as health information.
As a result, the company cannot let anonymous users inside the
firewall; users must be authenticated first. To shore up security,
Vital is using the Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA)
Server 2004 as an application-layer inspection firewall, virtual
private network (VPN) and Web cache solution. Nergaard said the
company plans to use the 2006 version when it becomes available.
The company began working on the pension system project in January
2005 and went into production in December with its first customer and
Norway's largest employer, the Norwegian Postal Service.
A key advantage of the SOA, Nergaard said, is it allows the company to
put more focus on reuse. "The services are shared by different
consumers," he said. "If you change the interface of the service it
will affect several different consumers. Now we can focus on reuse and
build the system so it will be handling reuse much better. Also, we
have more of an enterprise view of our architecture, so we don't see
each system as a monolithic architecture. All services are used by the
whole enterprise, not just one application. That gives us flexibility."
Vital was just starting a new project this spring that "will have a
huge advantage over the previous project because we can reuse a lot of
things," Nergaard said. He estimated the reuse value at $2 million.
Nergaard said as the company gains experience with its SOA, it will be
scaling up and making adjustments. "Of course we've done things we
should do differently," he said. "The process will be developed
continuously."
His advice for other organizations embarking down a SOA path is to
take an enterprise view. "Look at whole enterprise, because it will
affect the whole enterprise -- how you manage your systems, how you
develop your systems, how you organize your organization. Everything
will change."
At Vital, the IT department sold the idea, but Nergaard said more of a
top-down approach would help other organizations. But the business
side at Vital, he added, was "very pro SOA. It's up to us to prove it
now.">>
You can read this at:
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Pål, this should be one of your punters!
Gervas
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