Insurance Provider Delivers Efficiencies in Developing, Testing and Operating Mainframe Applications While Saving $620,000 Annually
Micro Focus (LSE:MCRO.L), the leading provider of enterprise application modernization, testing, and management solutions, today announced that the South Carolina Farm Bureau Mutual Insurance Company (SCFBMIC) has modernized its suite of mainframe applications with the help of Micro Focus’ Enterprise Application Modernization software. The modernization project has yielded significant efficiency gains as well as annual savings of $620,000.
Today’s insurance industry faces several challenges, including new business channels, industry regulations and increased competition. These challenges necessitate the transformation of IT to focus on exploiting the most suitable environment for developing, testing and operating mainframe applications to improve overall IT efficiency. SCFBMIC, an insurance provider serving both farmers and those outside the agricultural sector, had already consolidated its IBM mainframe application but still faced increased business pressures to significantly reduce annual operating costs while improving application service delivery. SCFBMIC’s applications provide a service to 600 distinct users in 80 different locations. The modernization project involved changing how they developed, tested and deployed their insurance systems, which included 926 million records of data, thousands of online and batch programs and sophisticated job scheduling and print management capabilities.
Following extensive product research, the SCFBMIC team chose the Micro Focus Mainframe Solution to embark on this strategic undertaking, employing Micro Focus Enterprise Server as its new deployment environment for applications. In addition, the development team will now perform its entire batch COBOL and online COBOL/CICS development and maintenance using Micro Focus Enterprise Developer, which provides a modern IDE built on Microsoft Visual Studio and offers a highly productive development environment for its mainframe application subject matter experts. Finally, the team will use Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer to explore how applications are truly structured, which will reduce unused datasets, and identify ways to further boost application efficiency and flexibility.
“Micro Focus has given us the tools to not only preserve the significant investments we’ve made in our application portfolio over the years, but also build on that investment to dramatically improve efficiency while simultaneously cutting costs,” said Bert Young, vice president of information technology, SCFBMIC. “The new systems not only provide a platform for the provision of new services alongside our proven COBOL programs, but our visual programming tools will also greatly speed up development, which boosts business agility and helps us create new, contemporary solutions for our customers.”
“No matter what industry you’re working in, IT budgets and system efficiency are always top of mind, and the process and costs associated with ‘ripping and replacing’ your applications don’t often align with these concerns,” said Steve Biondi, president of North America, Micro Focus. “We’re thrilled that SCFBMIC is able to capitalize on the resource investments they’d already made to increase effectiveness and agility moving forward. With the modernized system enabled by our Micro Focus solutions, SCFMBIC will not only be able to better serve its client base but it will also be able to reduce associated costs to improve its bottom line.”
Another benefit of the modernization initiative is that the cost of adding more processing capacity for testing has became much more affordable. SCFBMIC has been able to double the processing capacity while still achieving its target cost reductions. This has enabled them to perform more thorough testing in shorter timeframes, removing testing bottlenecks that the company could not previously afford to address.
To read the full SCFBMIC case study, please click here.
Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization, Testing and Management software enables customers' business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk. For additional information please visit www.microfocus.com.
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