The Travelers Companies, Inc.

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Every day, the 12,000 independent insurance agencies and brokerages that make up the Travelers distribution force develop hundreds of policy quotes. A large number of applications support the rate-quote process for automobile insurance, and in 2005, not one of these applications was integrated. Most ran on IBM mainframes and were developed on different platforms, including the .NET Framework, Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), IMS, Customer Information Control System, COBOL, and Microsoft Visual Basic. The disparate, mainframe-based architecture slowed the integration of new technologies and the company's ability to respond to business opportunities. In addition, agents had to manually interact with multiple applications to create a quote.

Rather than rebuilding its architecture, Travelers wanted to implement a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that could integrate legacy applications and provide a standardized infrastructure for new development. The company tested several technologies, including IBM MQSeries Integrator, but developers encountered issues translating COBOL copybook files. Instead, Travelers chose to deploy Sun Java Composite Application Platform Suite (Java CAPS). Not only did Java CAPS provide a COBOL adapter, but it is also part of an integrated development stack that includes numerous other technologies that Travelers would use, including the industry-leading Java Message Service (JMS Grid), which provides for high levels of message availability.

Travelers deployed Sun Java CAPS 5.0.4 on 18 Sun Fire T2000 servers running the Solaris 10 Operating System. To increase efficiency, engineers set up Solaris Zones on each physical server to support numerous virtual servers. Sun Management Center software and SunSpectrum Gold Support also provide 24x7 event monitoring and support.

Before creating an SOA, developers built a small gateway application with Java CAPS that provides comparative auto-insurance quotes from Travelers and other companies. At the same time, Travelers worked with Sun Professional Services to establish an Integration Center of Excellence, which would govern the development of Web services, train developers, and provide support materials such as best practices and reference implementations.

Once the gateway application was complete, developers used the Sun Enterprise Service Bus and numerous Intelligent Adapters in Java CAPS 5.1.1 to integrate software on the mainframe into a single composite application that uses The Travelers Portal as its interface. At the end of 2005, the SOA went into production. To initiate a quote, agents and service center personnel enter data into a J2EE user interface application. From there, Java CAPS manages all communication between the user interface and various applications running on different platforms that must be orchestrated to rate, quote and ultimately issue the business. The system — which processes eight transactions a second — rapidly delivers quotes. “The real advantage to the end user is quality,” says Bill Barz, lead architect, Travelers. “Java CAPS enables us to build a composite application that looks like one application to the end user but is really many applications that are seamlessly integrated.”

The company's use of virtualization and the T2000 servers minimizes hardware requirements. “Solaris Zones are absolutely great,” notes Barz. “They are very reliable and easy to set up. They don’t break. Virtualization in Solaris runs circles around competitive technologies. Also, our T2000s have 32 threads which are presented as virtual CPUs, which enables us to use fewer servers while supporting many, many threads.”

Beginning in 2006, to lessen its dependence on its mainframes, Travelers started migrating oldest rate-quote applications to a new national rate-quote system implemented using Java CAPS and deployed to the T2000 servers. At the end of 2007, Sun Professional Services helped to tune the application. And in January 2008, the application — which is integrated into the SOA — went into production in Mississippi. Deployment will continue one state at a time until the application is rolled out to all jurisdictions by the end of 2008.

Other divisions are also making use of the new development platform. “Java CAPS makes it really easy to expose code as Web services,” explains Barz. “This helps us to easily integrate third-party services or create an interface to small pieces of code.” To date, Travelers has created many web services with the Sun Business Process Manager in Java CAPS.

Other IT projects are also in progress. Engineers are working with Sun Professional Services to deploy a Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular library system. In addition, Sun Professional Services is working with Travelers to implement a high-performance identity management solution built on Sun Java System Identity Manager, Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition, and Sun Java System Access Manager. The highly scalable and flexible architecture will enable single sign-on, support a virtual directory, and provide extensive provisioning, auditing, and access-control tools. “One of the real advantages of choosing Sun is the level of support it provides,” concludes Barz. “Our Sun team has brought a lot to the table. I cannot imagine better support from a vendor.”