Is the Insurance Industry Behind the Times?

[pcbinsurance]

as a 25 year old in this industry, I feel like I am in the movie TRON when I deal with carrier websites, I am sure some of the systems and software language they used was written before I was born
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I KNOW, RIGHT?

(actually I'm 49 yrs old but all the young whippersnappers are always saying that and it annoys me)

 

[sellinmachine]

lmao, At 70 I will not voice an opinion of either generation,........well,

 

[milw352]

I've been in this business a long time and have yet to meet anyone - company or agent - that really feels a need to be tech savvy.

The insular thinking is mind-boggling.

milw352

 

[STIBROKER]

I've been in this business a long time and have yet to meet anyone - company or agent - that really feels a need to be tech savvy.

stibroker.....licensed in 1995....glad to meet you......now you have one under your belt...........

 

[VolAgent]

I've been in this business a long time and have yet to meet anyone - company or agent - that really feels a need to be tech savvy.

The insular thinking is mind-boggling.

milw352

The list is a bit old, but I imagine it hasn't changed too much. Once tech starts selling insurance, they'll start caring.

Largest US Life Insurance Companies: MetLife and New York Life Top Revenue Leaders | Suite101.com

 

[CaNewAgent]

I worked in the MIS departments of companies with gross sales of 800M to 1.2B for 21 years as the system administer/disaster recovery specialist. I have first hand experience in watching these companies deal with applications, program change control, security and user requested changes.

The companies I worked for used IBM i Series systems. This system was designed by IBM as a business computer with a lifespan of a minimum of 50 or 60 years. (as an example, we migrated the system to a 64 bit [FONT=&quot]architecture[/FONT] in the mid 90's. The system, by design will support a 256 bit [FONT=&quot]architecture.[/FONT]Windows just changed to 64 bit [FONT=&quot]architecture but most PC applications need to be changed to support it so most windows programs still run at 32 bit speed) [/FONT]

The hardware and Operating System are the most technologically advanced in the industry other than the big mainframe systems. By the way, all of the biggest of the big corporations use mainframe systems because of the sheer computing power they provide even though some applications are being downsized to smaller platforms.

Many of the applications in use by major corporations are written by major software development companies, like Oracle. The problem these companies have always faced is their own customization. The users, who give MIS budget money, want customization as a means of using software as a competitive advantage. This customization will often mean a relatively simple upgrade to the newest version of the vendor package takes 1 to 2 years because the custom modifications need to be re-evaluated and moved forward to the new package.

I have seen user testing of the upgraded software on a separate development system take over a year.

My wife used to work for an Allstate agent. At one time, Allstate used to install a scaled down version of this system in every agents office. They had thousands of them. I pity the group that had to upgrade the hardware, operating systems and software for Allstate back them. Truly a nightmare.

Now, we get to insurance software. I did some consulting work for a division of a major carrier in SoCal 6 years ago. The were trying to be state of the art, using only web based software so agents could use a PC and a web browser. They were streamlined but it still took a long time to get the software changed so they could enter a new market. At the time they wanted to start selling boat, motorhomes and motorcycle insurance. They also had to get the new application approved by the CA department of insurance and them roll it out to the agents. This was no small undertaking.

We, as insurance agent/producers want new applications delivered to us fast, we want it to 100% bug free and we don't want to pay much for it. We can't expect all three. I'll take bug free and relatively low cost. Even these are next to impossible to deliver.

I hope this helps explain the MIS/corporate side of the picture.

 

[shepnerd]

Mainframes? I'm not an expert on this stuff, but those things are dinosaurs aren't they? Google is basically a string of PC's wired together.

If you think these guys are on the cutting edge, you dont do much business with them.

I mean, seriously, any computer system designed to last 50-60 years is comical. 10 years ago my desktop couldn't do a fraction of what my phone does now.

 

[VolAgent]

Mainframes? I'm not an expert on this stuff, but those things are dinosaurs aren't they? Google is basically a string of PC's wired together.

If you think these guys are on the cutting edge, you dont do much business with them.

I mean, seriously, any computer system designed to last 50-60 years is comical. 10 years ago my desktop couldn't do a fraction of what my phone does now.

Don't embarrass yourself.

There are plenty of mainframes out there, they just are different than they use to be. Most are standard PC chips interfaced together to work as one computer and they require very specialized software to run. ORNL and UT are some of the leaders in this. Google is different. It is basically a big distributed dataserver, not a massive number cruncher, its design is completely different.

Also, designing a system to be useful for 50 years is smart. One of the biggest things holding some companies back is the data they started digitizing 30 or 40 years ago. Right now, nothing but its current system can understand it, and until they get it transferred over to a newer design, they are stuck using those older computers. For insurance companies that can have policies with a lifespan of 30, 40, 50 or even 70+ years, that is huge. You can't just wipe all that out, it has to be transferred over.

 

[CaNewAgent]

Mainframes? I'm not an expert on this stuff, but those things are dinosaurs aren't they? Google is basically a string of PC's wired together.

If you think these guys are on the cutting edge, you dont do much business with them.

I mean, seriously, any computer system designed to last 50-60 years is comical. 10 years ago my desktop couldn't do a fraction of what my phone does now.

It's easy to think of mainframe computers as dinosaurs since they have been around for so many years. The truth is scalability and raw horsepower.

The IBM i5 system (and mainframe) is impervious to virus's, worms and trojan horses. How does that grab you? The key is the architecture. Windows and other PC operating systems allow a file type to be changed to something else, i5/OS does not. Windows will allow a PC to download something masquerading as a safe file type and then be automatically converted to an executable. This is how a virus works. You download or open something, it gets changed to a virus, the virus code corrupts the registry of whatever the author wants it to do and you are in trouble. In the IBM world, everything that is created is created with a create command or is compiled. It is a program or a database file or whatever. There is no conversion between types.

The i5 system will allow you to install any operating system you want. Like Linux?, you can install as many Linux partitions as you want and it only takes 1/10 of a processor for each one.

Like Windows servers? You can install as many Windows based integrated servers you want in the same card slots as any other card and you can use proprietary tape drives to back it up and have more configurable disk as Windows will allow.

Like Unix or a Unix based software? You can install Aix (IBM's Unix) on any partition you want or port the application to an i5/OS partition and you will not need to make any modifications to the source code to do so.

Want a web based application? i5/OS supports the Apache HTTP server and has the best back end security for your web site in the business. I can name serveral web sites that are exclusively run in i5/OS but you can't tell it from the front end interface.

Like Domino as a large scale mail server? i5/OS has exceeded all benchmarks for mail and calendar users of all systems.

It can do it all and is IBM's best kept secret, which it shouldn't be. Ask any other hardware/operating system vendor if their system can do all this and they would be speechless. The answer is no.

Yes, they designed this system in the 80's as a mini computer. It's first implementations were installed in 1988. Most large and I'm talking large corporations have databases, where the size is hard to comprehend. Programs that run through billions of records need high horsepower and lot's of memory. These companies also need outstanding reliability, the capability for disaster recovery and high availability.

As a matter of fact, Microsoft was one of IBM's biggest customers for many years. That is until Bill Gates was showing some reporters the data center and they took a photo of an IBM i5 system. This caused a huge ruckus in the PC tech world. How could our beloved Microsoft use computers built by the enemy (IBM)? The fact is Microsoft is a large corporation and it needed everything the IBM i5 offered.

You mention google. I was surprised to find this article which confirms they do use thousands of PC based hardware. I would have been willing to bet the farm they used some sort of large systems but they somehow found a way to use thousands of computers to do the job that most companies consolidate on a handful of systems. Somehow they found a way to run the business on PC hardware. I still bet they have a big system somewhere.

Your phone, is just a toy. So you can access a web page. So you can access e-mail. So you can text and somehow manage to drive your car. That's nothing compared to what real business systems do all day everyday. PCs hardly qualify as business computers. PC based servers are only now being able to use virtualization software (Vmware) that allows them to run more than one SQL implementation at a time. By the way, the software vendors all say they do not support Vmware. They want their software installed on a single server so the server become underutilized.

Sorry to make this post so long. I worked on these systems for many years and only left the industry because I grew weary of spending 23 hour shifts doing upgrades.

 

[ksigmtsu]

There is no reason to use a mainframe anymore, because of the nature of distributed processing, and Moores law making planning a cycle over 10 years arbitarially more expensive than necessary.

Also, the only pc operating system that lacks file level security has always been windows, and virtualization has existed for quite some time.

You can create similar computing power to a large mainframe at a fraction of the cost by using a version control system like subversion or git.

Facebook and google both rely heavily on these concepts.

Mainframes have been dinosaurs for a while.