Neil Betteridge, Whitehill Technologies’ vice president of marketing and product management, recalls when the mantra in the insurance industry was mainframe, mainframe, mainframe. But in the past few years he has seen a change afoot.

“Where we used to hear it needs to run on the mainframe, we are now hearing Windows or the mainframe,” Betteridge said, adding that the shift “has been brewing over the past couple of years.”

Betteridge said he has seen a large jump in the number of Windows servers in use in insurance companies and attributes this rise to several factors.

“For business applications like policy production there is a natural affinity. There are a lot of compelling Windows-based offerings in the claims management and policy administration space and there is a lot of talk and even more action in terms of replacing mainframe applications and moving to more Windows-based platforms for their core policy administration systems,” he said.

Betteridge also sees more enterprise content management systems running on Windows as insurers increasingly see Microsoft well positioned to take enterprise content management down a more progressive and Web-centric path.

“These are active areas in terms of getting content into the digital realm,” Betteridge said. “For both CRM [customer relationship management] and BPM [business process management] it’s becoming much more common to see those running on Windows servers.”

A bit of a caveat is the database where many firms have continued to house data in the mainframe, but are increasingly using Windows servers to run applications using that data, he said.

Betteridge noted that in comparison to the brokerage or banking industries, insurance is the segment of financial services in which UNIX made comparatively minimal inroads.

“There weren’t compelling business reasons to move to UNIX,” Betteridge said, noting that there really weren’t standout UNIX-based insurance systems put out by insurance vendors. “Now Windows has grown and become so available that you would be hard pressed to find an insurance business application software that is only available on UNIX.”

Meanwhile, the Web services approach that Microsoft has embraced has dovetailed nicely with industry-wide initiatives in the insurance industry.

“It’s hard to have an insurance conversation without XML being in there,” Betteridge said. “It makes it easier to connect and also encourages connection across the Windows and other platforms.”

Indeed, the insurance industry’s ACORD association, whose mission is to facilitate the adoption of data standards for the industry, adopted XML early and has developed XML-based standards for both the life and annuity and the property & casualty/surety businesses.

Whitehill’s <xml> Transport product uses XML for a document management solution, converting structured and unstructured data to XML to be rendered to various output formats and routed across distribution channels. Betteridge, who was with InSystems before its acquisition by Whitehill in July, also focuses on the former InSystems products within Whitehill, IStream Communicator and IStream Publisher.

“I think we are also seeing changes in the Windows server environment in terms of being more comfortable with virtualization and doing a more effective and efficient job,” Betteridge said. “Our customers are making heavy use of virtualization in testing. Virtualization tools make it comparatively easy to create a new environment instead of requiring a lot of effort from systems support and we’ve seen much higher utilization of Windows servers in this area.”

Increasingly it’s not uncommon to see VMWare or another virtualization tool on a Windows server running multiple virtual servers to accommodate a development environment and two test environments, he noted.

The Windows server virtualization that is on track to be available with the release of the next Windows server, codenamed Longhorn, should provide more flexibility and let more firms maximize their server investment. Betteridge sees this technology as having a particular sweet spot for more sophisticated mid-size and lower tier companies as they move to the next generation of technology.

“It’s bringing high-end technology innovation to the rest of us,” he said.

www.whitehilltech.com