Mergers and acquisitions scenario
IBM® Integration Bus manages the flow of information across two disparate IT infrastructures after a company merger.
This scenario describes how IBM Integration Bus is used by a fictitious insurance company to manage two disparate IT infrastructures after a small, Internet-based insurance company is acquired by a large, more traditional, insurance company. The description focuses on what happens when a potential customer requests a motor insurance quotation by using the merged company Web site. This scenario is based on a larger, more complex scenario that was published on developerWorks®. To read the full scenario see the links at the end of the scenario description.
Background
Company A is a motor and general insurance company that has been in business for approximately 50 years and currently has approximately 5 million policyholders. The company uses agents and a call center to communicate with customers. The company has a large established IT infrastructure, which includes CICS® Transaction Server for z/OS® and IBM DB2 Universal Database on z/OS.
Company B is small Internet-based motor insurance company, which currently has less than 1 000 000 policyholders, and is expanding. The IT infrastructure managed by the company includes WebSphere® Application Server on Microsoft Windows Server, and Oracle Enterprise and IBM IBM DB2® Universal Database on Windows desktop.
The problems
Company A acquired Company B to gain access to the Internet-based insurance market and to use the Internet-based skills and IT infrastructure established in Company B. The two companies have customer and policy data of different formats but, for legal reasons, the data from the separate companies cannot be merged. However, the administration costs of managing the separate IT infrastructures are high. Also, customers, agents, and call center staff need a single administration process to interact with the company data.
The solution
Now that the two companies have merged, users can request an insurance quotation by giving some basic personal information in a form on the Web site of the new company. WebSphere Application Server, on which the Web site runs, forwards the request in XML format to IBM Integration Bus using the request queue in a IBM MQ cluster. IBM Integration Bus transforms the XML request to the COMMAREA format that is used by Company A systems, then routes the request to those systems. IBM Integration Bus also routes the request, in XML format, to Company B systems. Both systems return a quotation to IBM Integration Bus.
Logic within IBM Integration Bus also requests a risk assessment from the internal underwriter and applies the returned risk to the quotations from systems within Company A and Company B. The integration node detects that, in this instance, the best or lowest quotation for the customer has been generated by Company A systems. Therefore, the integration node transforms the quotation from Company A from COMMAREA to XML, and routes the quotation back to WebSphere Application Server to a reply queue in the IBM MQ cluster, where the quotation is stored for up to 14 days. WebSphere Application Server returns the quotation to the customer.
The following diagram shows the flow of information in this scenario.
