Standard Life has saved £6m by developing new products
on a life and pensions platform wholly built using a service
oriented architecture.
The insurance company is due to go live with 11 products on the
platform this week, and it plans to build all new products on the
platform for the foreseeable future.
Although product development using the platform only began last
August, Standard Life has been able to launch 14 products using
SOA. All of the insurer’s Irish business is now administered using
the platform, and legacy products for the Irish market have been
migrated.
The SOA used by Standard Life is based on IBM’s Websphere. It
has enabled the IT department to cut costs and speed up product
development by reusing applications and modules across
projects.
Standard Life chief technology architect Ian Muir said, “We put
some capability in our SOA to identify reuse in December 2004. We
are getting £6m in savings now.”
In an IT department of 400 people, 70 employees are working on
developing reusable modules to support the SOA. More than 80 such
applications are currently being used.
However, the insurer is continuing to run the bulk of its
business – the 50 to 60 products that it sells in the UK – on a
non-SOA life and pensions platform.
The SOA has also helped Standard Life get ready for its planned
demutualisation in July. Preparations began in summer 2004 and have
taken in a change to the finance system and verification of the
identities of the mutual’s members, who will vote on the move. More
than 120 IT staff worked on the demutualisation project at its
peak.