West Bend Mutual Insurance Company Selects Progress Software for SOA Solution; Places Premium on Improving IT InfrastructureBEDFORD, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 14, 2009--
Progress
Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) a leading software provider that
enables enterprises to be operationally responsive, today announced that
West Bend Mutual Insurance has selected the
Progress®
Sonic® ESB (enterprise service bus) and
Progress
Actional® products to build a
service-oriented
architecture (SOA) based IT infrastructure.
West Bend Mutual
Insurance, a property and casualty insurance carrier, is pulling
together dozens of disparate internal policy administration applications
into a single integrated insurance portal.
The seamless integration of West Bend Mutual Insurance’s applications
will help reduce the cost of business processes and improve their
ability to react more quickly to business opportunities. This increased
business agility will enable West Bend Mutual to accelerate the
introduction of new insurance products in order to help them grow their
business in a soft market.
Craig Walker, IT director, West Bend Mutual Insurance Company,
commented: “Our goal is to put more control into the hands of our
business users so that they can respond to the market and our customers
in a timely manner. Ultimately, the Progress Sonic ESB and Progress
Actional products enable us to build a more robust, scalable and
distributed SOA framework, which will empower our business users to
bring new insurance offerings to market more quickly.”
West Bend Mutual Insurance will use Sonic ESB and Actional to supplement
its existing policy administration system and improve collaboration
across its network of independent insurance agents. As a result,
insurance agents will be able to conduct business more easily and
effectively with West Bend Mutual. Moreover, the newly developed
insurance portal will become a critical tool to help them improve their
customer retention and acquisition.
Hub Vandervoort, CTO, SOA Products, Progress Software, noted: "All
enterprises today are challenged to remain operationally responsive
while keeping up with the ever increasing velocity of business.
Insurance carriers find it particularly challenging as so many of their
back office functions reside on legacy infrastructure. West Bend is a
great example of a carrier that realizes how SOA can provide the agility
needed to bring new products to market and nurture the agent
relationships, all while reusing existing IT investments."
West Bend Mutual Insurance will use Actional products for end-to-end
monitoring and visibility of its back office systems to ensure that they
are meeting the service levels demanded by agents and customers.
Actional products provide cost-effective, high performance,
enterprise-scale solutions to the problems of SOA management and
governance. The Actional products enable operational and business
visibility and policy-based security and control of services and
end-to-end business processes in a heterogeneous runtime environment.
Sonic ESB is a messaging-based enterprise service bus that simplifies
the integration and flexible re-use of business applications within West
Bend Mutual’s SOA infrastructure. The Sonic ESB product helps
enterprises transform rigid and fragile point-to-point integration into
a reliable architecture that can evolve, scale and extend throughout the
enterprise.
Progress Software Corporation
Progress Software Corporation (NASDAQ: PRGS) is a global software
company that enables enterprises to be operationally responsive to
changing conditions and customer interactions as they occur – to
capitalize on new opportunities, drive greater efficiencies and reduce
risk. The company offers a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class
infrastructure software spanning event-driven visibility and real-time
response, open integration, data access and integration, and application
development and deployment – all supporting on-premises and SaaS/Cloud
deployments. Progress maximizes the benefits of operational
responsiveness while minimizing IT complexity and total cost of
ownership. Progress can be reached at www.progress.com
or +1-781-280-4000.
Progress, Actional, Sonic ESB and Sonic are trademarks or registered
trademarks of Progress Software Corporation or one of its subsidiaries
or affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. Any other trademarks
contained herein are the property of their respective owners.
Source: Progress Software Corporation
Progress Software
Lisa Coulouris, +1 781-280-4995
lcoulour@progress.com
or
LEWIS
PR
Richard Young, +1 617-226-8842
progresssoftware@lewispr.com
