Unification sweeps the marketplace

Rethink IT, May, 2004

For the past couple of months, the minds of IT decision makers have been dominated by the pact between Sun and Microsoft. After years of feuding, lawsuits and outspoken soundbites, the two companies laid down their arms and agreed to license each others' technology and drop antitrust and patent actions. So the industry is a quieter--perhaps a more boring--place, but there are some clear advantages for users in better integration of the key technologies of the age, Microsoft .Net and Sun's Java. Of course, the door is open to Microsoft dominating Java and increasing its stranglehold on the market, but it is up against some powerful rivals--not so much Sun, which remains a wounded lion, but IBM, the real guiding genius behind Java, and the emerging enterprise force of Nokia.

Unification is something of a theme for this issue. Nor necessarily at the high level of Java politics, but sometimes in a more prosaic sense. This month's Masterclass, for instance, looks at how insurance giant MetLife managed to attain a unified view of all its customers and shift its systems to support a client-oriented approach rather than one centered on policy types, with significant business benefits.

Unifying voice and data networks is one of the dominant trends of the past year, and Microsoft and Sun, despite their new truce, are fighting it our to take advantage of this sector. Both are shrinking down their technologies to run effectively in devices that will support voice over IP as well as data services.

Unifying wired and wireless LANs has become an increasingly painful headache for IT directors and network managers. Cisco has products on the horizon but smaller players like Extreme and Foundry claim already to be offering converged platforms.

Convergence is also an important trend in the always critical security market. After years of cobbling together spot solutions for antivirus, firewall, network protection, intrusion detection and so on, enterprises have the opportunity to buy integrated suites containing all the facilities. Some still argue that a collection of best of breed products is still a better option, despite the additional integration workload involved, but vendors like market leader Symantec are basing their plans to grow their enterprise business on providing a one-stop shop. We examine Symantec and its double-edged sword--the recent huge rash of security alerts boosts its business and the budgets of its customers, but what if it cannot keep pace with the increasing speed and cleverness of the hackers?

Amid all these new trends towards convergence, one technology is celebrating its fortieth birthday and is still going strong--the IBM mainframe. Our Mainframe Markets article looks at the future for the 'old dinosaur', which remains so central to so many of our readers' IT strategies.

RELATED ARTICLE: MetLife's systems keep its customers satisfied.

When Steve Kessler, vice president of application development at US insurance giant MetLife, agreed to produce a single unified view of all of the company's customers, he knew he was taking on a job that had killed previous managers.

But he knew that the way his business was focused, purely around insurance contract files, was not the way for it to continue into the future.

He also knew that, if he were successful, it would enable the MetLife enterprise to move from its roots, historically centered around its products, to be a financial services organization centered around its customers.

He never quite explained why he was crazy enough to take on the job, but you get the feeling that he was happy when help arrived.

DWL came in to talk to him about its enterprise hub, called DWL Customer, and as they explained it to him he said: "I know just what you mean, we're just about to build that."

It represented a breakthrough for both him and for DWL and, three and a half years later, MetLife is well on the way to integrating all of its customer data.

Kessler sees it all as about moving to a services oriented architecture. "In an insurance company the back end processes are all built around the contracts that people have signed. They are central to what we have been doing for many years. The question is how do you shift the company's culture?"

MetLife was a mutual insurance company for 135 years, then in 2000 it demutualized and went public. The ensuing focus on profitability is perhaps part of the reason for the change of structure.

"We decided to unify the customer records one step at a time. This year we would do the life records, then look at the auto business and then the home," said Kessler.