There's been plenty of debate as to whether SOA delivers its value via the reuse of services, or through increased flexibility to change business processes. However, one of the big value-adds of SOA may come from its ability to extend the life of legacy systems. An Australian-based health insurer is setting an example of SOA in Action, demonstrating the direct link between SOA and competitive advantage.
The insurance carrier, HBA, is in an intensely competitive market, where price makes the difference. For six years, the insurer has kept its premium increases lower than the industry average through a consistent formula -- keeping operating costs to less than eight cents of every member dollar.
As explained in this recent article, HBA hopes to keep these costs in line over the years to come by repurposing its legacy assets, which represent decades' worth of investment. Plus, the company's programming staff was versed in COBOL, meaning the moving to a newer environment would mean maintaining and staffing for two different language sets. "Once you have multiple languages to work in, we felt restrained with our compact programming team," Peter Powell, CIO of HBA, is quoted as saying.
HBA is porting its COBOL-based applications to MicroFocus COBOL, which will enable pieces of applications to be run on non-mainframe platforms, but still maintain COBOL functionality. "We can now start to look at how to exploit our applications for multi-channel interactions. We can start looking at Microsoft .NET development using the COBOL base to start putting applications on the Web," said Powell.
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