SEATTLE, July 7, 2008 – Attachmate Corporation today announced that Century-National Insurance Company is using its Verastream® Host Integrator software to provide its brokers with instant, remote Web-based access to insurance policy information previously locked away on mainframes. Leveraging Verastream software, Century-National has lowered overhead costs and decreased profit-killing administrative mistakes by speeding brokers’ access to information and reducing paperwork and redundant data entry.
Century-National Insurance, a California-based subsidiary of Kramer-Wilson Company Insurance Services, is one of the top writers of homeowner's and other consumer insurance policies in the West. Prior to using Verastream software, Century-National’s process for maintaining and updating information on the mainframe was complicated and laborious. Century-National Insurance’s IT department had to manually change the Web site, as well as the mainframe, every time a policy rating changed. As a result, the company’s brokers were not able to quickly access mission-critical insurance policy information or issue insurance policies instantaneously.
“Verastream has dramatically reduced mainframe maintenance,” said Lou Balicki, vice president of information systems with Century-National Insurance. “With Verastream, we can complete IT activities more quickly and effectively than our previous methods of manually updating difficult COBOL interface data; allowing our IT department to focus their efforts elsewhere and ultimately, increase productivity.”
Century-National Insurance needed a solution that would allow them to seamlessly transfer data stored on its back-end mainframe systems to a new Web-based application. The company first used a MiniSoft terminal emulation application to try to streamline data on its mainframes, but found the MiniSoft offering did not provide an impressive return on investment and did not have sufficient support for troubleshooting when problems arose. Century-National Insurance turned to Attachmate for a better solution.
The company saw immediate benefits as they were able to quickly deploy Verastream and create a Web-based application. Now, the flexibility of the program is allowing brokers to use the Web-based application to access homeowners insurance information from five of the six states in which the company operates. The company plans on deploying the solution to the final state, as well as creating similar web-based applications to allow brokers to access information on personal automobile and earthquake insurance.
“The ease-of-install and flexibility of Verastream in transferring the functionality of our HP mainframes really made it stand out,” said Saro Hamamah, software development manager for Century-National Insurance. “The beauty of it was I didn’t have to go into the midrange system to modify it. Verastream was able to automatically adapt to fit our needs.”
Century-National Insurance appreciated Attachmate’s commitment to their customers in addition to enjoying the superior performance that Verastream provided. Furthermore, implementing Verastream did not disrupt any business processes, making the transition easy and safe for Century-National Insurance.
“Attachmate has been there to help us with anything we need through the deployment and ongoing use of Verastream,” said Balicki. “They truly care about their customers’ experience with Verastream and are confident in their solutions. It’s like business used to be; that’s why we like dealing with Attachmate.”
About Verastream
Verastream Host Integrator is part of the Verastream legacy integration suite, a complete range of mainframe, Web and desktop modernization tools built to speed the reuse of legacy application investments. Verastream software delivers the full spectrum of basic rejuvenation to customized presentation and sophisticated high-performance integration. Verastream-generated services can be mixed, matched and reused to extend legacy functionality to new applications or users. No code changes to legacy applications are required.
Attachmate® Verastream software works collaboratively or as a stand-alone tool along with the company’s integration, legacy access, security and management products, enabling companies to extend the use of existing IT investments while they adopt valuable new technologies to improve their businesses.
About Attachmate
Attachmate, owned by an investment group led by Francisco Partners, Golden Gate Capital and Thoma Cressey Bravo, enables IT organizations to extend mission critical services and assure they are secure and compliant. Attachmate’s leading solutions include host connectivity and systems and security management. Our goal is to empower IT organizations to deliver trusted applications, manage service levels, and ensure compliance by leveraging knowledge, automation and secured connectivity. For more information, visit www.attachmate.com.