Talk about integration challenges. I recently spoke with a number of insurance companies about their SOA strategies for aging policy administration systems for a new report in Insurance Networking News. In some cases, company policy administration systems were still running on mainframes that were almost four decades old.
"I suspect that, like The Hartford, there are many companies that have aging, legacy platforms," said Rich Maynard, property and casualty chief architect for The Hartford Financial Group. This says a lot for the staying power of mainframes, which continue to this day as the workhorses behind 80 percent of the world's data. And, in the case of The Hartford, its commercial lines system is chocked full of logic and applications that gives the carrier a leg up on its competition to this day.
The company will modernize some mainframe-based policy administration systems that are now decades old, while replacing others. In some cases, the commercial lines systems provide competitive advantage, while the consumer systems are more of a commodity application that will be replaced.
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