For more than 73 years, this leading insurance business has provided its customers with specialized insurance choices nobody else could offer thanks to its incredible research department. And for more than half of that time, it has partnered with Software AG because of the rock-solid stability, security, and flexibility of Adabas & Natural.
That partnership had always thrived, but in the wake of multiple global financial crises in the early 2000s, the business faced a perfect storm: an aging IT and support workforce, coupled with out-of-support systems and software.
“The whole industry grappled with these challenges, and I think it’s a testament to Software AG, Adabas & Natural, and our own people that we were able to find a way through this period,” says the Technical Data Lead. “But as soon things started to stabilize, it became critical to our continued success to quickly get up to date—and offload our database administration so we could focus on our core business.”
At first, the company tried tackling these problems internally. But with retirements on the horizon and experienced Adabas Database Administrators difficult to find, the business quickly realized the best outcome, lowest risk approach was to call in longtime partner Software AG—and its Professional Services experts—to implement a long-term, reliable, and sustainable solution.
“The kicker was when we calculated that a one-day unplanned outage would cost us more than an entire annual maintenance contract,” says the Technical Data Lead. “At that point, it really was a no-brainer. And offloading DBA services to the experts at Software AG let us focus on what we’re best at to better position our business for a bright future.”
So in 2018, the business reinstated full maintenance of Adabas & Natural and begin the upgrade to the latest versions. It was the right decision, considering at the time, Adabas & Natural were directly responsible for over $2 billion in annual revenue.
But it wasn’t necessarily going to be an easy process. After all, the project involved over 207 GB of Adabas data, over 2,000 Natural objects, and 10,000 COBOL objects, many tightly coupled with custom code written by employees who were already beginning to retire. Even more vexing was the lack of documentation. “In many cases, the source code itself was the primary documentation,” says the Technical Data Lead.
Fortunately, Software AG Professional Services are the best in the business at transforming these sorts of challenges from high liability to lowest risk. And since the business and Software AG had fostered such a tight-knit partnership over the decades, they were able to work together as a single team.
The actual upgrade took place without a hitch, and with zero degradation of existing services—achieving something an internal solution hadn’t been able to accomplish despite years of effort. This eliminated the possibility of countless security and unplanned outage risks, while also shifting IT resources to innovate. Now, when a repeat customer needs to update their coverage or add a new insurance product, the process happens faster than ever.
But a one-time solution wasn’t enough, and a bigger problem loomed. Today’s young developers are unfamiliar with legacy technology stacks and tend to embrace the ethos of pushing potentially buggy code today with the intention of fixing it tomorrow—an approach incompatible with the insurance business. After all, the company’s customers expect it to be their fallback when things go wrong, without exception.
So how to find the right people able to manage a business-critical Software AG environment?
“We knew that there were other companies that offered Database Managed Services to support Software AG products, but we decided to go to the experts who developed the products,” says the Technical Data Lead. That’s why the company contracted Software AG to perform the upgrade project and to provide full database managed services. No more worrying about an unstable Software AG environment, who wrote what code, who is next to retire, or whether a critically needed change might bring whole systems to a halt.
As a result, the business now has up-to-date Software AG technology, and a long-term, sustainable solution to managing its systems without having to hire IT staff with an increasingly hard to find profile.
This means the company has pivoted back to innovating within its areas of expertise, offering new web and mobile approaches to interacting with its customers. And it has gained the agility to respond more quickly to changes in its many insurance submarkets and offer solutions for new markets as they emerge.
