British Friendly reduces risk and guarantees system availability with Actian Services and Enterprise Management Appliance (EMA)
Company Size
200-1,000
Region
- Europe
Country
- United Kingdom
Product
- Ingres v9.2.3
- Enterprise Management Appliance (EMA)
- Enterprise Management Service (EMS)
Tech Stack
- Ingres Database
- ABF
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Database Management & Storage
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Infrastructure Inspection
- Predictive Maintenance
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
British Friendly is an income protection mutual company that was founded in 1902 to provide sickness benefits for commercial travellers and their families. The company is based in Bedford in the UK and has nearly £100m in assets. As an income protection mutual, the company exists solely for the benefit of its 15,000 members and has no shareholders to whom they pay dividends. British Friendly has an insurance product that has several thousand members who have paid into it and need to be honoured over the lifespan of the product - which means that it could take more than 40 years before all the policies are paid out. The members’ and payment details are managed through a M2000 insurance application which is written in ABF and is based on the Ingres database.
The Challenge
British Friendly, an income protection mutual company, was running an outdated version of the Ingres database (v2.6) for their M2000 insurance application. The company wanted to upgrade to Ingres v9.2.3 to benefit from the database’s new functionality and new hardware. However, they only had one administrator to manage the M2000 insurance application and lacked the internal resources needed to both upgrade to v.9.2.3 or continue to monitor the Ingres database to ensure their applications and associated systems continue to run smoothly. Furthermore, the company needed to ensure that their internal risk levels were not compromised by upgrading their internal systems.
The Solution
British Friendly engaged Actian Services to implement a long-term support solution that addressed their issues. The solution included the replacement of existing old hardware, management of their M2000 application written in ABF that uses Ingres, and upgrade of Ingres to a current version. Actian Services completed the upgrade to Ingres v9.2.3 and implemented a three-year Enterprise Management Service (EMS) which manages their M2000 application using Actian’s Enterprise Management Appliance (EMA). The EMA is designed to improve the reliability and availability of British Friendly’s Ingres database and M2000 application by proactively monitoring them to provide early warning of potential problems, and alerting them about any problems that occur.
Operational Impact
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