Customer Story
Syarikat Takaful Malaysia Berhad
The combination of Assure MIMIX HA and Precisely Connect ensures data integrity and availability of Syarikat Takaful Malaysia Berhad’s system and apps
Following the recent implementation of a Core Takaful System for the General and Group businesses, Syarikat Takaful Malaysia Berhad contracted IBM and Precisely to provide smooth migrations from their IBM Db2 for i databases to the Microsoft SQL Server databases, and from obsolete IBM hardware and legacy applications to the latest IBM technology and CSC Insurance software.
Takaful Malaysia’s core application system consisted of Group Takaful, an application hosted on an IBM Power 5 iSeries server with internal storage, and a General Takaful application (PREMIA) running on an IBM Power 5 AIX server and DS8000 storage platform.
The ageing hardware not only imposes a performance penalty, it also generally incurs higher maintenance costs, said Patrick Wong. “Increasing the impetus for an upgrade, the end-of-life of the IBM i5/OS V5R3 and AIX 5.3 operating systems signaled a withdrawal of vendor support,” added Patrick.
While these contributing factors made a strong case for a migration, Patrick added that Takaful Malaysia sought improved functionality, performance and security of the new systems. Patrick explained, “We specifically wanted integrated tape encryption and backup, providing data security and protection, coupled with real-time replication that would allow the disaster recovery server to meet our strict recovery time and recovery point objectives.”
The company also required a real-time database replication tool with the data integrity control to feed data to a Customer and Agency Portal. Finally, the coming implementation of a Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime set a definite timeframe within which Takaful Malaysia had to complete the project to comply with the tax requirements.
Patrick said that, after a thorough selection process, Takaful Malaysia opted to standardize the CSC applications, namely Takaful Integral Group and Integral P&C Takaful. The selected hardware platform was an IBM Power 720 server configuration.
Read more about how Precisely’s Assure MIMIX HA provides hot replication of the IBM System i database environment for this customer while Precisely’s Connect powers the cross-platform database replication required to populate the Microsoft SQL Server database behind the customer and agency portal.
