Chapter 15. Winterthur Case Study


In this chapter, we will describe the Service-Oriented Architecture implemented by the Winterthur Group, a leading Swiss insurance company with its head office in Winterthur. As an international company, the Group provides a broad range of property and liability insurance products in addition to insurance solutions in life and pensions that are tailored to the individual needs of private and corporate clients. The Winterthur Group has approximately 20,000 employees worldwide, achieved a premium volume of 33.5 billion Swiss francs in 2003, and reported assets under management of 138.7 billion Swiss francs as of December 31, 2003.

In 1998, Winterthur's Market Unit Switzerland developed a concept for an Application Service Platform. Since then, this application and integration platform called "e-Platform" has been implemented and used as the technological basis for the realization of a Service-Oriented Architecture. Its main purpose is to provide a common set of standards, guidelines, processes, frameworks, and integrated products in the form of a single package suite to access functionality available on the mainframe through standardized service interfaces. This functionality is then used to provide customer data access, claims notifications, financial reports, life insurance quotations, analysis and management of company risks, and information systems for insurance brokers.

The main focus of Winterthur's SOA is to provide reusable coarse-grained and technology-independent services for the application frontends in order to enable the access of backend functionality on the mainframe. This matches the purpose of an SOA, which is to decouple the existing system components by applying the principles of modularity and encapsulation.

The main business driver for the SOA introduction was Winterthur's plan to offer their customers, partners, and employees new channels, in particular access using the Internet/Intranet, which required a tighter integration of existing functionality. The monolithic mainframe system provided a major obstacle to those plans, and therefore they decided to use an SOA to start it. They hoped that the SOA, which was technologically based on CORBA, would significantly reduce the overall complexity of the system and help to lower soaring maintenance costs. It was the desire to reuse as much of the implemented services as possible.

In the meantime, the platform has become a suite of integrated software infrastructure technologies, consisting of an integration framework, a portal framework, a security framework, and enterprise application servers. Today, it is not only used in Switzerland but also abroad in other Market Units of Winterthur.

The case study presented in this chapter will show in some detail how the SOA has been implemented at Winterthur, both at the organizational and technical levels. Section 15.1 describes the general scope of Winterthur's architecture. Section 15.2 discusses the organizational structures and processes used to implement the SOA. A more technological perspective is presented in Section 15.3, and finally, Section 15.4 describes the lessons learned, benefits achieved, and future enhancements for the company.



    Enterprise SOA. Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices
    Enterprise SOA: Service-Oriented Architecture Best Practices
    ISBN: 0131465759
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2003
    Pages: 142

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