Founded in 1901 and headquartered in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Sociedad Militar Seguro de Vida (SMSV) delivers a wide range of insurance and financial services exclusively to members of the country’s armed forces. The firm’s 700 employees provide services via 23 branches across Argentina.
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Financial and insurance institutions across the globe are increasingly faced with customer demand for more innovative, customized, on-the-go services. This means that companies in the sector need to be able both to execute transactions and launch new business services more rapidly.
SMSV wanted to accommodate this demand, as Carlos Scordo, the company’s IT Manager, explains: “Nowadays, people expect faster, always accessible services, and if we wanted to provide these capabilities, we needed to drastically re-think parts of our current technology.
“Technology is a fundamental enabler of our services and business success, and our IT landscape must constantly grow and change to match our corporate requirements.”
To deliver even more rapid, high-quality financial services, SMSV needed a comprehensive IT refresh.
To streamline and modernize its environment, SMSV re-hosted its business applications from the mainframe system to Micro Focus Enterprise Server running on x86 servers.
Christian Migliaccio, SW Project Leader at SMSV, states: “We chose to work with Micro Focus as they were able to offer a solution that no other vendor could match – fast, reliable and cost-efficient – and which allowed for highly compliant and transparent modernization.”
Alejandro Nazarevich, Data Processing Manager at SMSV, adds: “Whilst we recognized that moving away from the mainframe would unleash cost savings and slash complexity, we didn’t want to run the risk of completely re-writing our applications, as this would have defeated the very purpose of the project. We didn’t want to end up breaking applications that we built 20 years ago! Micro Focus proved to be the right solution to avoid this scenario.”
He continues: “We needed a way to emulate the mainframe, but on an Intel platform. Micro Focus Enterprise Server allowed us to re-host our mission-critical applications – which account for 30 percent of our whole application landscape – to Intel servers faster and without having to dig around our old COBOL code and risk changing anything.”
SMSV also now uses Micro Focus Enterprise Developer to modernize its business applications, helping it to develop and launch innovative financial services faster.
The company leveraged Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer as a pre-planning tool and continues to use it as an ongoing performance optimization solution, as Alejandro Nazarevich explains: “Each of our applications goes through Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer for workload impact analysis, which allows us to gain a complete view of the inventory in our repository, with 90 percent COBOL code coverage.
“We recently re-hosted our relationship management application – one of the most critical ones – and Micro Focus Enterprise Analyzer enabled us to optimize the code, fix any inefficiencies and generally improve the migration phase in a really quick and easy way.”
Deploying Micro Focus Enterprise Server, Enterprise Developer and Enterprise Analyzer helped SMSV to move its business-critical applications to a platform that is easier and less costly to run, whilst providing total reliability and high performance.
Re-hosting its applications to x86 and optimizing them with the Micro Focus technologies helped SMSV accelerate execution and performance times by 40 percent, enabling it to deliver more timely services to its partners.
In addition, the cost savings generated by the Micro Focus solution enable SMSV to keep rates low for its partners, strengthening loyalty and retention.
“One of the biggest advantages is the portability of the solution,” remarks Carlos Scordo. “Our COBOL code can now more easily be integrated with web and mobile applications built in Java – which is crucial if we want to develop new, attractive financial services.”
Alejandro Nazarevich adds: “Because we were able to keep working with the same COBOL code, we didn’t have to hire new personnel and train them in new ways of working. Homing in on our internal skills and knowledge gave us great peace of mind that our key business systems would continue to run robustly and successfully.”
Carlos Scordo concludes: “We are so satisfied with the Micro Focus solution that we have already purchased more licenses for use with additional programmers, and are looking forward to re-hosting the rest of our business applications over the next few months.”
