Insurance Company Chooses Attunity for DB2/400-to-SQL Server Replication

March 23, 2010 Alex Woodie

The Taiwan subsidiary of New York Life Insurance has achieved substantial savings and eliminated much manual programming by using Attunity‘s log-based changed data capture (CDC) software to replicate data from an i/OS server to the Windows applications used by its customer service representatives, the software vendor announced last week.

With assets of almost $1.9 billion and more than 300,000 policyholders, New York Life Insurance Taiwan Corporation (NYLITC) is one of the largest life insurance companies in Taiwan. Like many large insurance companies, NYLITC’s IT department uses a mix of different platforms and databases to keep the business running.

However, the heterogeneous computing environment complicated data integration tasks, especially with multiple Asian languages and double byte character sets (DBCS) in the mix. NYLITC employed a team of programmers to keep the different databases as up-to-date as possible.

Just the same, it commonly took the programmers up to two days to refresh NYLITC’s databases with the latest, freshest data. This resulted in customer service agents having less-than-fresh data in front of them when speaking with customers–a less-than-ideal situation.

When NYLITC embarked upon a project to automatically integrate its data, it evaluated several data replication offerings. But the quest ended when it looked at Attunity and its Operational Data Replication (ODR) offerings, which have been adopted by a number of i/OS shops over the years.

Specifically, NYLITC purchased and implemented Attunity’s Stream product to keep DBCS data flowing from an i/OS-based server to a SQL Server database that’s used to generate reports and Web interfaces used by NYLITC’s customer service agents.

According to NYLITC project manager Sebastian Ma, the software works in near real-time, and gives customer service agents access to fresher data. But perhaps more importantly, the software has alleviated the back-office burden on programmers, he says.

“It’s hard to put a price tag on the value of the countless hours of effort we’ve been able to save on custom programming by using Attunity’s ODR Solution,” Ma says in a press release, “but it’s estimated that we’ve been able to cut as much as 70 percent from the end-to-end process time, with a 30 percent overall cost-savings on the related labor and overhead.”

Those are impressive figures, and they tend to support the claims made by other Attunity customers that have implemented Attunity on DB2/400, including Atlantic Detroit Diesel Allison (Atlantic DDA), a distributor of heavy equipment in the northeastern United States, and EMI Music North America, the music distributor.