Irish Life move to Windows platform expected to save €2m per annum

Trade

This case study was provided by Microsoft.

During the economic challenges Ireland has faced over the last four years, the market for retail life insurance and pensions has fallen by more than 65%. To overcome this very real challenge in their business, Irish Life wanted to find a more cost-effective technology to support CLOAS, its life insurance administration system. This is their core system on which all policies are administered, and represents a significant element of the company’s total operating costs.

Irish Life took a proactive stance and looked at how they could make changes which would realise significant cost savings through reducing operational costs and increasing efficiencies and productivity throughout its organisation.

Starting in 2009 with a small team, Irish Life delivered an IT overhaul which saw it move off its IBM based mainframe system to a modernised Windows platform. The new system went live on 25 February 2013.

Brendan Healy, group CIO, Irish Life, said: "The benefits of moving to the Windows platform have been even more than we expected. We were paying a premium for the IBM mainframe environment it was based on. With the new system in place we have already realised significant benefits; an immediate savings of €2 million scaling to €2.5 million annually on licensing fees; a significant 75% reduction in batch processing times going from eight hours to two hours, which in turn increases the availability for our critical life insurance administration application, CLOAS, which will help us to significantly more business.

"And, by improving our development environment with the .NET Framework, developers are far more productive. Everything from coding to testing is more streamlined, and that has led to shorter development timelines."

Initially, Irish Life conducted a proof of concept to compare Oracle database technology with Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Enterprise software. The company decided that SQL Server would deliver a long-term advantage in terms of cost and integrated technology. They saw that SQL Server 2008 R2 would provide a much better value for money. It also fit better with their plans to implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM and to develop other internal applications on the Microsoft ASP.NET web application framework.

Frank Kennedy, enterprise sales director, Microsoft, said: "Irish Life is a great showcase demonstrating how businesses can overcome the economic constraints we continue to face. By making the decision to invest in modernising their IT platform, especially when most are thinking of slashing budgets, they have already seen a return of investment."