Interamerican Insurance Selects Veryant and Clerity for IT Modernization

February 13, 2012 - Veryant, the COBOL technology innovator, announced that Interamerican Insurance has selected Veryant vCOBOL Enterprise and Clerity's UniKix Mainframe Rehosting software as part of a strategic plan to modernize its central insurance IT system.

The company, which serves more than 1 million health and life insurance customers, selected Clerity's UniKix Batch Processing Environment (BPE) and Veryant's vCOBOL software to move all legacy COBOL-based batch applications from IBM® z/OS® on the mainframe to Linux on IBM System z®. At the same time, the project will expand and improve functionality in several areas.

Clerity provides mainframe rehosting software and migration services to modernize legacy applications on more affordable and efficient platforms. Veryant offers software to modernize legacy COBOL applications.

Interamerican, the second largest insurance company in Greece, conducted a thorough search for vendors to provide the software and expertise required for the project. During this evaluation period, Clerity was the only company that demonstrated experience with projects comparable to Interamerican's plans. Clerity helped the German pension fund system, Deutsche Rentenversicherung (DRV), with a very similar project. It migrated IBM CICS® workloads to Linux on IBM System z, helping DRV meet a 350 million euro cost-cutting government mandate.

Interamerican is redeveloping its online IBM CICS workloads on the mainframe as Java Web-based applications, using UniKix to address batch/JCL requirements, and vCOBOL to support migrated COBOL programs in a similar way to the z/OS environment, until everything will be redeveloped in Java. The company will be deploying UniKix BPE and vCOBOL on mainframe Integrated Facility for Linux (IFL) processors in production. More than 2 Terabytes (TB) of sequential, VSAM and IBM DB2® data are accessed by this system.

"Since we wanted to focus mostly on our revedelopment plans, and the move to an open computing environment, we were looking for a platform that would help us achieve our strategic goals with the least disruption of our existing everyday processes," explained Nikos Katsaros, CTO, Interamerican.

UniKix BPE provides a complete environment for administering, executing, and managing IBM z/OS and IBM z/VSE® batch JCL workloads that have been migrated to open systems without excessive code change or complex integration requirements. The technology supports a variety of application programming languages including COBOL, PL/1, Java, Natural and C/C++.

vCOBOL offers seamless integration between COBOL programs and Java server environments, so Interamerican can use the best of both. The Java connection was important to the company because Interamerican's new application environment will be SOA-enabled, and Java is an ideal fit for evolving existing applications.

Katsaros was also pleased that, with UniKix and vCOBOL, all development activities will be removed from the mainframe. Post-migration, most development work will be done on smaller Linux machines and laptops and then deployed to Linux on IBM System z when ready for production.

Interamerican will be managing and completing this project primarily with internal resources; Clerity will provide training and consulting services to support the initiative. The project is expected to begin this month.