American National Property And Casualty Co. Implements NEON's Shadow z/Services Mainframe Web Services Solution For Real-Time Updates To Insurance Information Systems

Soap-Enabled CICS Applications Eliminate Need for Batch-Oriented Systems

Sugar Land, TX - NEON Systems Inc., the mainframe integration experts, today announced that Shadow z/Services has been successfully implemented by American National Property and Casualty Co. (ANPAC), Springfield, Mo., to provide mainframe Web services for CICS applications supporting the company's new real-time insurance information system. Shadow z/Services' ability to simplify the creation of mainframe-based Web services enabled ANPAC's developers to take an industry standard approach to modernizing their legacy batch-oriented system.

ANPAC, a provider of property and casualty insurance products and services, is a subsidiary of American National Insurance Company, Galveston, Texas.

ANPAC wanted to update their legacy insurance information systems to provide real-time information and functions to their field agents and employees. A batch-oriented process distributed daily updates to the agents' system, creating data redundancies and duplicate systems. After many years and numerous modifications, the system had become increasingly complicated to maintain and inhibited ANPAC's ability to add enhancements for new products and services. To address these issues, the company created an initiative called "INternet Systems Providing Instant Results for Everyone" or INSPIRE.

The INSPIRE project was designed to Web-enable ANPAC's insurance information system, allowing them to process transactions immediately. ANPAC wanted to utilize an architecture that would allow components on different platforms to work together in a service-oriented architecture to leverage Web services to maximize re-use of existing code. Their end goal was a reduction of program code and data redundancy, ultimately leading to the faster development of new products.

ANPAC created INSPIRE to use technology to help achieve their business goals of excellent customer service, innovative products and low expenses. One of their top considerations for INSPIRE was the need for a system that was flexible and built around services that could be more rapidly developed into applications to address changing business needs.

"Shadow z/Services was instrumental in enabling our INSPIRE initiative. We needed a way to integrate our backend mainframe systems with our distributed front-end systems. We spent six to nine months researching various products, so identifying a viable mainframe Web services solution was definitely critical to this whole project," said Doug Gaar, lead programmer/analyst, ANPAC.

Shadow z/Services' support for industry standards allowed ANPAC's developers to use existing .NET programming skills to create a SOAP interface to backend applications running in CICS.

"This initiative is a fundamental change to how we support our agent information systems. With the legacy information system, the data was redundant and had to be pushed out to the agents' systems by a batch-oriented process so they were getting data as of the previous night. So what Shadow z/Services is really doing for us is helping eliminate these redundant or duplicate systems resulting in lower maintenance costs," said Gaar.

Customer service has also improved with the implementation of Shadow z/Services, according to Gaar, "With the new capabilities, being able to go directly to the mainframe host in real-time, all of our data is accurate and up-to-date." Having the most relevant information available helps ANPAC's field agents properly price policies to insure a customer.

"Web services can dramatically reduce the complexity of integrating mainframe applications with distributed systems," said Mark Cresswell, president and CEO, NEON Systems. "By choosing Shadow z/Services to solve its legacy system interoperability challenges, ANPAC benefits from a proven, industry standard approach to mainframe integration. Utilizing mainframe service oriented architecture has accelerated ANPAC's ability to deploy new, more accurate information systems which ultimately have enabled them to better serve their policy holders, and drive down costs."

About Shadow
NEON's Shadow technology reclaims the value of mainframe-based services and events, providing scalable, real-time legacy integration with security across a broad range of data, applications and presentation environments. Shadow is designed to enhance mainframe integration on both Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Event-Driven Architectures (EDA). With a strong commitment to industry standards, Shadow can dramatically reduce integration complexity and accelerate application development for systems based on J2EE, .NET or Web Services. Delivering the flexibility to meet customers' unique implementation needs, Shadow can be cost-effectively deployed as either an infrastructure-based, programmatic integration server or a suite of mainframe adapters.

About NEON Systems
NEON Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:NEON) is a leading provider of enterprise-class mainframe integration solutions, delivering the only unified mainframe integration platform to support the entire range of requirements for modern Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA) and emerging Event-Driven Architectures (EDA). NEON's Shadow technology is designed to reduce the complexity of mainframe integration allowing large organizations with significant commitment to mainframe systems to streamline incumbent technologies and lower total cost of ownership. NEON's Shadow z/Services and Shadow z/Events offerings attack the emerging mainframe Web services and real-time mainframe event-driven markets and are unique in their depth and breadth of support for the requirements of such markets. With extensive mainframe integration expertise, NEON is uniquely qualified to solve the complexities of supporting new business initiatives that must integrate with critical mainframe systems. For more information on the future of mainframe integration, see our Web site at http://www.neonsys.com or call 800-505-NEON.

Source: NEON Systems Inc.