Novell Helps to 'Nsure' the Insurance Company

One of the oldest life insurance companies in the United States has turned to Novell to provide better service to its agents and policyholders. Working with Novell and its partner Alphanumeric Systems, North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company (NCM) was able to create a secure employee portal in just six weeks, giving agents access to customer and policy information over the Web.

NCM manages more than 750,000 life and health policies across 23 states, requiring its agents to spend a lot of time traveling and working remotely. But dial-up access to the corporate network was a costly, slow process, making it difficult to retrieve even basic customer or policy information. Customer service suffered as a result. After evaluating Citrix, VPN, and other remote access solutions, NCM worked with Alphanumeric to select a solution based on Novell® Nsure™ security identity management.

"We were familiar with the security, reliability and ease of management that Novell's solutions provide," said Marcellus Venable, vice president of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. "We also wanted to do everything in an open environment, supporting open standards, so that we weren't tied to any one platform. Novell's cross-platform products make it easy for us to deploy the solution in a variety of ways and to easily make changes going forward."

NCM worked with Alphanumeric Systems, a Novell solutions provider and Platinum Partner, and Novell's consultants to create the NCM Portal in six weeks, giving all employees secure, remote access to applications with a single username and password. The Nsure solution creates a central hub for data changes and safeguards security by giving employees access only to the specific applications they need to do their jobs. Employees can access the new portal anywhere through a Web browser, which not only eliminates costly dial-up charges, but also dramatically improves the work environment for agents, who in turn are providing better service to hundreds of thousands of policyholders. In addition, the NCM Portal lays the foundation for extending Web-based services to policyholders in the near future.

One of the most valuable features of the NCM Portal is it gives agents secure, anytime access to their documents via a Web browser using Novell iFolder™, a Novell Nterprise™ solution. "With Novell iFolder, agents can store information about clients that will follow them wherever they go," said Steve Millington, technology officer of North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company. "Agents can enjoy the flexibility of working offline, and then synchronizing their files when back online."

Dave Lawrence, Novell vice president of Nsure solutions, added, "Novell Nsure has not only solved North Carolina Mutual's remote access challenges, but it has done so in a way that supports the company's future plans to extend services to an increasingly Internet-savvy customer base. That's a huge competitive advantage. And the deployment also highlights the success Novell channel partners like Alphanumeric are seeing with secure identity management solutions."

For more information about Novell Nsure solutions, go to www.novell.com/nsure.