A) Client: A leading online auto Insurance Company –development of the online quote system

Executive Summary

The client has developed the first national, Internet-based personal insurance provider and over will be expanding to include most major lines of personal property and casualty insurance, such as homeowner’s and boat insurance, as well as life insurance.

We provided it’s services in developing, integrating and maintaining different Visual Basic based Components like Rating Engine, Underwriting Engine and Vehicle data identification database.

Business Challenge

Then the client was relatively a new company in the field of web-based provider of auto insurance policies. The company was always in a constant state of development. It had signed up with major auto insurance providers to provide competitive bids on auto insurance policies to its clients. As with any new and rapidly developing company, the client had one scarce resource – time. Also the unpredictability of new insurance providers signing up with the company made forecasting a major issue.

The client used a variety of technologies to build this web-based application. The architecture planned for this implementation required technical staff with varied technical expertise. Since eSurance.com lacked this major resource, it approached our team to provide them with its technical expertise. Our technical personnel understood the requirements and implemented the technology required for the application.

Exploring Solutions

Though there existed various technological solutions to implement the technology, the client had to find the right mix, a mixture that was made of robust and reliable technology and one that was easy and fast to implement.

After analyzing the various options available, the client found that using J2EE, Visual Basic and Active X and XML was the right choice.

Implementing and using the System

Our technical personnel understood the requirements for the client’s application and designed and developed a major part of the various components of the application on a Time and Material basis. The client’s QA team directly undertook the QA and testing of the application.

The various components or contributions that we made directly in the building of the application can be summarized as follows:

• Developed a Project Build utility using XML and Visual Basic 6.0
• Various business components as ActiveX DLL’s, (COM) in VB 6.0 hosted as a middle-tier on MTS.
• Modules for the uploading, integrating and maintenance of Vehicle data (Year between 1980-1984) from flat files to MS-SQL Server 7.0.
• “Quick Quote project” developed using JSP, Java Servlets, J2EE platform.
• Our development team was responsible for analysis, designing, implementing and testing the E-mail system for this site using third party EasyMail software, which uses SMTP protocol to send Emails to customers.
• Responsible for implementing various web pages in ASP, Java script, VBscript and HTML 4.0 in Visual Interdev 6.0

Optimizing Technology Resources

The style of the client’s application development was different when compared to most applications in terms of resource allocation. The development effort was a combination of the resources within the company and outsourced resources like ours.

Proper integration of these resources determines the fate of this application keeping in view that amount of development time played a major role. Our personnel understood the requirements and the development managers of both companies made a seamless integration of these efforts.

Most of the infrastructure in terms of hardware and software required were from the client thereby directly contributing to the reduction in cost.

Bottom Line Advantage

The uniqueness of the application in the auto insurance market segment and the speed at which it was developed gave the client a head start in the world of Internet based insurance marketing.

The company started generating revenues right from the day the application went live. The revenues generated supplemented to the financial needs of the company for expansion and future development.