Company Launches Groundbreaking Processing Platform in Virtual Cloud Distributed Environment

Company Launches Groundbreaking Processing Platform in Virtual Cloud Distributed Environment

John Hancock Financial Services, headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, is a unit of Manulife Financial Corporation, a leading Canada-based financial services group serving millions of customers in 21 countries and territories worldwide. The 150-year-old company offers a broad range of financial products and services, including life insurance, fixed and variable annuities, mutual funds, 401(k) plans, long-term care insurance and college savings. At a time when profits throughout the industry were at an all-time low — particularly for investment products — John Hancock was looking for an innovative way to lower costs. A key area of focus was the company’s IT environment. John Hancock has relied on CSC’s software and services for annuity administration for more than 20 years. The software license for two CSC systems was up for renewal and the company was considering its options. The management team wanted to modernize but they also wanted to retain the many features of the software, so they talked to CSC about ways to reduce costs without replacing the core annuity system.

Making a Bold Move

CSC proposed converting the software from a mainframe to a virtual mid-tier, distributed platform using the open-source Linux operating system. CSC used specialized tools to speed the process so the firm could take advantage of IBM’s System z with Linux. “We talked to CSC about the zLinux option and were intrigued,” said Tony Todisco, vice president, John Hancock Annuity Systems. “No one else had done it, but CSC hosts our mainframe and they had already had success moving companies to a mid-tier environment.” To ensure a smooth transition, John Hancock established several requirements. The new platform had to be compatible with John Hancock’s systems, with no need for modifications, and the batch cycle performance had to be equal to or better than the company’s existing operating system. The new environment had to allow for potential future strategic technology upgrades. Working together, John Hancock and CSC made a successful transition to a CSC-hosted zLinux environment for CSC’s VANTAGE-ONE® administration software, as well as its software for supporting agent commission processing. John Hancock’s business users were also actively involved ensuring that there would be no disruption in the existing functionality. They made sure when they were testing the system that they were receiving the correct data and they were able to perform all functions of the systems. As the first hosted zLinux environment for CSC in financial services, this project represents ground-breaking technology transformation in the traditional mainframe-dominated life and annuity industry.

Driving Down Costs

The replatforming project reduced John Hancock’s annual costs for software and computing capacity by $2.2 million. CSC’s hosting service essentially provides the company with a distributed private cloud infrastructure that enables secure and scalable virtualization. The zLinux platform has positioned John Hancock to move forward in the future with strategic upgrades including CSC’s Wealth Management Accelerator® administration software and Customer Service Accelerator®, which supports customer service across multiple back-end systems.

Leading the Client Community

John Hancock is involved in CSC’s client communities on several different levels and was awarded an overall Industry Leadership award for the project by the company’s peers. “CSC has such a huge financial services client base,” said Todisco. “Anytime you get together with peers in other client companies, you learn a lot through sharing ideas and best practices — trying to leverage what each of us has done in upgrading systems. CSC gets to hear what their clients really want, and the clients get to influence the direction that software development needs to go in.” CSC and John Hancock have worked together on numerous projects over the years, including large-scale systems integration and consolidation projects to support the company’s merger with Manulife, product launches, enterprise-wide program management, service-oriented architecture planning, system upgrades and conversions. “Since 1987, CSC has been John Hancock’s strategic partner, supporting our wealth management practice with applications and infrastructure services,” Todisco said. “This relationship has enabled us to improve efficiency, productivity and profitability while focusing on the essential functions of our business.”