Flexible in the Field: Insurance Company Keeps Its Applications Accessible to Independent Agents

Technology always advances; for those who can keep up, technology opens new business opportunities in the process. As National Farmers Union Property and Casualty Company sought ways to keep its agents in the field connected, it was already clear that the web offered great benefits as a way of sharing information outside the company. The question was: how do you keep agents connected when they use a variety of computing sources?

National Farmers Union Property and Casualty Company, based in Greenwood Village, Colorado, offers a range of policies to farms, small businesses and individuals primarily in the north central and Rocky Mountain states of the U.S. Independent agents carry out most of National Farmers Union’s business, and they have a large degree of freedom to use whatever computer equipment and software they choose. This recently posed an interesting challenge to National Farmers Union’s IT department: how best to link the agents and their software as tightly as possible with the company’s business applications, without insisting on full control over the client platform.

As it turns out, Compuware Uniface provided an answer to this challenge and others National Farmers Union soon faced, including legacy renewal and Internet access to business-critical applications. Uniface is Compuware’s development environment for building, renewing and integrating the largest and most complex enterprise applications. Offering high developer productivity and leading-edge functionality, Uniface helps IT organizations reduce the cost of ownership for business-critical applications and increase the return on investment for the IT budget.

Uniface Fits the Bill

Finding Uniface to be well integrated with the company’s AS/400 and Windows platforms, National Farmers Union gave Uniface a central role in its legacy renewal strategy. This involves gradually developing new functionality and replacing outdated COBOL programs with Uniface client/server applications. A few years ago, each insurance agent did business using a copy of National Farmers Union’s client software and a local Solid database. Every night, all the data accumulated during the preceding day had to be uploaded to National Farmers Union and synchronized with the main production database—a very slow and cumbersome process.

The company’s long-term goal is to rewrite all its business-critical applications so agents can do their work with nothing more than Internet access and a browser. So far, the car insurance line of business has been rewritten from Uniface Client/Server to Uniface Web, using a combination of Uniface Server Pages, Uniface Session Services and Uniface WAS (Web Application Server) to access data on the AS/400, using Dynamic HTML (DHTML) for the user interface. The other lines of business will follow in due course.

Uniface JTi offered an excellent interim solution, as it can add a web interface to a conventional client/server application without any server-side code changes at all. Moreover, it requires zero clientside administration and was thus found to be an efficient and costeffective way for National Farmers Union to make its applications more widely accessible. More than 100 agents in several different states have been using JTi to access National Farmers Union applications hosted at its home office in Greenwood Village.

Giving Access to Those Who Need It Uniface View, the Uniface portal solution, is used to create the National Farmers Union portal and greatly simplifies the demanding task of pulling together a wide variety of applications, data and other resources through a single user interface. Lines of business still running Uniface Client/Server can easily be reached through the portal; the user just clicks on a hyperlink and the desired application is displayed in the browser window, courtesy of JTi. The insurance agents gain access to the corporate intranet by logging in through Uniface View. Once logged in, they can launch their JTi applications, which are not available to the general public.

National Farmers Union chose to deploy some of its applications using the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. Instead of incurring the heavy upfront costs of buying, installing and running in-house software applications, the SaaS model takes advantage ofcheap and high-bandwidth web access and enables organizations to buy application time in the same way they pay for electricity or company cars. Access to SaaS offerings—software that is "owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers" —is provided "just in time," with someone else picking up all the capital costs and the entire administrative overhead. National Farmers Union chose an SaaS approach because it was the simplest and most flexible way of allowing partners, such as the insurance agents, to make use of its IT resources.

Many Evaluated, One Chosen

The company’s IT staff handles maintenance, support and daily operations centrally, without having to venture far afield. Before undertaking the migration to a web interface, National Farmers Union evaluated Microsoft .NET and J2EE (now Java EE) as possible alternatives to Uniface, but the development staff thought it too risky to switch to unfamiliar technology for such a big, important and urgent project. A small team was able to build a first-class system in less than a year with Uniface, while a competitor with a much larger IT department took two years to build a comparable system with different technology.

"So far, things are going exceedingly well," says Stan Hume, National Farmers Union’s IT Vice President. "The product seems to be right and the system has been very well received and is performing as we expect. We’ve got several other [Uniface] projects going as well, some large, some small, but all are on track."National Farmers Union Property and Casualty Company, based in Greenwood Village, Colorado, offers a range of policies to farms, small businesses and individuals primarily in the north central and Rocky Mountain states of the U.S. Independent agents carry out most of National Farmers Union’s business, and they have a large degree of freedom to use whatever computer equipment and software they choose. This recently posed an interesting challenge to National Farmers Union’s IT department: how best to link the agents and their software as tightly as possible with the company’s business applications, without insisting on full control over the client platform.

As it turns out, Compuware Uniface provided an answer to this challenge and others National Farmers Union soon faced, including legacy renewal and Internet access to business-critical applications. Uniface is Compuware’s development environment for building, renewing and integrating the largest and most complex enterprise applications. Offering high developer productivity and leading-edge functionality, Uniface helps IT organizations reduce the cost of ownership for business-critical applications and increase the return on investment for the IT budget.

Uniface Fits the Bill

Finding Uniface to be well integrated with the company’s AS/400 and Windows platforms, National Farmers Union gave Uniface a central role in its legacy renewal strategy. This involves gradually developing new functionality and replacing outdated COBOL programs with Uniface client/server applications. A few years ago, each insurance agent did business using a copy of National Farmers Union’s client software and a local Solid database. Every night, all the data accumulated during the preceding day had to be uploaded to National Farmers Union and synchronized with the main production database—a very slow and cumbersome process.

The company’s long-term goal is to rewrite all its business-critical applications so agents can do their work with nothing more than Internet access and a browser. So far, the car insurance line of business has been rewritten from Uniface Client/Server to Uniface Web, using a combination of Uniface Server Pages, Uniface Session Services and Uniface WAS (Web Application Server) to access data on the AS/400, using Dynamic HTML (DHTML) for the user interface. The other lines of business will follow in due course.

Uniface JTi offered an excellent interim solution, as it can add a web interface to a conventional client/server application without any server-side code changes at all. Moreover, it requires zero clientside administration and was thus found to be an efficient and costeffective way for National Farmers Union to make its applications more widely accessible. More than 100 agents in several different states have been using JTi to access National Farmers Union applications hosted at its home office in Greenwood Village.

Giving Access to Those Who Need It

Uniface View, the Uniface portal solution, is used to create the National Farmers Union portal and greatly simplifies the demanding task of pulling together a wide variety of applications, data and other resources through a single user interface. Lines of business still running Uniface Client/Server can easily be reached through the portal; the user just clicks on a hyperlink and the desired application is displayed in the browser window, courtesy of JTi. The insurance agents gain access to the corporate intranet by logging in through Uniface View. Once logged in, they can launch their JTi applications, which are not available to the general public.

National Farmers Union chose to deploy some of its applications using the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model. Instead of incurring the heavy upfront costs of buying, installing and running in-house software applications, the SaaS model takes advantage ofcheap and high-bandwidth web access and enables organizations to buy application time in the same way they pay for electricity or company cars. Access to SaaS offerings—software that is "owned, delivered and managed remotely by one or more providers" —is provided "just in time," with someone else picking up all the capital costs and the entire administrative overhead. National Farmers Union chose an SaaS approach because it was the simplest and most flexible way of allowing partners, such as the insurance agents, to make use of its IT resources.

Many Evaluated, One Chosen

The company’s IT staff handles maintenance, support and daily operations centrally, without having to venture far afield. Before undertaking the migration to a web interface, National Farmers Union evaluated Microsoft .NET and J2EE (now Java EE) as possible alternatives to Uniface, but the development staff thought it too risky to switch to unfamiliar technology for such a big, important and urgent project. A small team was able to build a first-class system in less than a year with Uniface, while a competitor with a much larger IT department took two years to build a comparable system with different technology.

"So far, things are going exceedingly well," says Stan Hume, National Farmers Union’s IT Vice President. "The product seems to be right and the system has been very well received and is performing as we expect. We’ve got several other [Uniface] projects going as well, some large, some small, but all are on track."