Founded in 1969 and headquartered in Calabasas, Calif., Countrywide Financial Corporation offers diversified financial services to consumers and businesses. Those services cover a wide range from home mortgage loans, retail banking, and investments to property, liability, and life insurance. Countrywide has an international clientele, more than $4.5 billion in 2002 revenues, 550 offices, and 30,000 employees.
Based on its innovative use of cost-effective technologies, Countrywide has become known as a visionary in the financial services industry. That reputation was reinforced when Countrywide, in just four months, accomplished real-time integration of a new Siebel CRM system in their mixed legacy mainframe environment. Attachmate Verastream software played a key role in the process.
Information Silos Impede Communication
Like many large corporations, Countrywide has distinct business divisions with their own IT infrastructures, including disparate legacy mainframe systems segmented by functional barriers. When one of Countrywide’s divisions, Balboa Insurance Group, wanted to set up an online virtual claims office, they had to break down some of those barriers.
With policy information dispersed throughout the enterprise, Balboa couldn’t get the single, complete view of the customer they needed for efficient processing of claims. Customer service representatives were constantly traversing green screens on multiple legacy applications, and toggling between those applications and their Siebel CRM system.
Lack of synchronization also hindered deployment of the virtual claims office. Balboa’s Siebel 7-based claims system was working in real time, while their AS/400 based legacy applications were designed to do batch-mode processing. And there was no way to unlock the customer data in their IBM mainframe and AS/400 systems. That information—and selected mainframe logic—needed to be extracted and made available for use in their Siebel framework.
Siebel + Legacy: Not an Easy Integration Scenario
The ideal solution for Balboa would be an integrated interface for customer service representatives to get an online view of insurance claims, with Siebel as the common front end. Although Countrywide typically produces homegrown IT solutions, Ed Godycki, the company’s executive vice president of CRM and e-business technologies, decided on a different approach due to a number of reasons.
Balboa’s mainframe systems had been in existence for decades, and had grown more complex with each passing year. And there was the Siebel factor: Conventional integration methods demand that you dig deep into the underlying technology (low-level COM interfaces, data fields, database triggers, Siebel scripting, and message transmittals) to get the job done.
This scenario would be too expensive, time-consuming, and risky, especially in terms of business-process integrity. The biggest challenge perhaps was to keep the mainframe logic doing its original, mission-critical work while the transformation took place. “Interrupting the information flow was not an option,” Godycki said. “The task was like giving the car a tune-up while the engine is running.”
The Verastream Difference
Verastream software makes it possible for Siebel eBusiness Applications to communicate dynamically and bi-directionally with any other enterprise system, from your oldest legacy mainframe to your newest web application. Some Verastream advantages: graphical tools to encapsulate legacy functionality, automatic generation and deployment of web applications, component interfaces, and web services, support for J2EE and .NET support, and a scalable runtime server.
With support for the complete Siebel eAI Framework—from Siebel Workflows and Virtual Business Components to Integration Objects and Business Services—Verastream software lets you work at the highest business-services level. There's no need to write custom scripts, deal with low-level interfaces, or duplicate existing business logic.
How Did They Do It?
A Countrywide developer, using Siebel tools, built a user-interface element that would accept data coming in from the mainframe applications. Then the developer, using Verastream software, encapsulated key Balboa loan-processing, policy-tracking, and claims-management functionality into services. Those services, which retain all the information about the mainframe behavior, were then made available to Siebel 7.
A Countrywide developer used Verastream to encapsulate required mainframe functions as composite services so Siebel could interact with them.
The result for Balboa: A Siebel-centric view of all policy information, making the virtual claims office possible. Verastream software also provides extensive load-balancing and fault-tolerance capabilities that met specific requirements for Countrywide/Balboa operations. “We weren’t sure there was a tool that could do it all,” said Godycki. “This is good stuff.”
Now, Verastream software handles the integration of legacy mainframe and Siebel information. Instead of scrolling through multiple green screens, Balboa Customer Service Representatives can now view up-to-the-minute account information through a single web front end (Siebel). They no longer have to navigate multiple mainframe applications because the Siebel interface captures policy, loan, and claims data in real time.
A Solution With Ongoing Potential
The services created for this tactical Balboa CRM project can now be reused for other Countrywide initiatives, both tactical and strategic. Moving forward, each new application can be developed faster than the one before it, because the “building blocks” have been created.
In fact, the Countrywide development team has already started using Verastream software to break down more of the functional barriers across the organization. They plan to extend previously siloed mainframe functionality to employees, customers, and partners through additional new applications. And with Verastream software’s broad host support (including IBM Series z, IBM Series i, UNIX, HP e3000, and OpenVMS), that will be no problem.
Godycki said he had only one regret about this integration experience: “We wish we had found Attachmate sooner.” Among Attachmate’s attributes he cited low-key sales and high-performance partnering. “I feel like Attachmate is truly interested in making my life easier,” he said. “They want to see you succeed.”
And regarding Verastream, Godycki was impressed with the four-month turnaround time for his integration project. “That’s an unheard-of timeframe for a CRM implementation,” he said, adding, “the initial results were rapid, and the integration was seamless.”