Eliminating legacybarriers to digital transformation

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18/11/2019

JASON GLEASON

Client Snapshot:

Founded 170 yearsago, AMP is a leading wealth management company that Australiansand New Zealanders know best for superannuation, lifeinsurance, investment, and advice. Headquartered inSydney, Australia, the company’s reach spans the globe withoperations in 11 countries.

TheProblem

AMP undertook a digital transformation of its CRM and analytics capabilities – yet a dependency on legacy systems stood in the way of change.

A large,multinational business, AMP has considerable investment in mission-critical,legacy systems that it needs to maintain. The company relied on end-of-lifemiddleware to exchange data between these legacy mainframes and its CRMsolution – used by external brokers nationwide. This application was highlyunwieldy and required large amounts of bespoke code to reformat and transferthe data. Given the effort needed to push data to new platforms, it would havebeen impossible for AMP to fully take advantage of any new, cloud-basedsolutions.

The relationshipbetween code and data led to a major gap between legacy technology and modernarchitecture – holding back AMP’s digital transformation efforts and imposingdelays that threatened to impact the company’s competitive edge. It becameclear to AMP that, to maintain operational efficiency and service quality, itneeded a better way to exchange data within its organisation.

The Approach

AMP is committed to leveraging the latest technology innovations to maintain its high standards of service quality and efficiency.

As part of thisstrategy, AMP aimed to carry out a digital transformation of its CRM andanalytics tools – migrating to cloud-based solutions and taking advantage ofnew, advanced functionalities. However, the company’s existing technologysystems could not support such a transformation.

A solution to bridge today and yesterday

Following successin the public sector, Eightwire came to AMP’s attention as the ideal fit forthis project. AMP engaged Eightwire to replace their ageing middleware platformand eliminate the reliance on bespoke code. The task was twofold, but bothchallenges shared a single solution: Eightwire’s Automated Data Exchange.

To deliver thisproject, Eightwire’s proprietary algorithms mapped data from 9 mainframe hostedsystems to data schema. Eightwire’s automation algorithms then processed datafrom the policy admin systems and transformed it to meet XML data structures.The entire service is easily managed by AMP with all data processing andsecurity controls built into the Eightwire platform.

The Benefits

With Eightwire’s automated data exchange, AMP no longer has delays in building and maintaining information exchange from policy administration systems. AMP can seamlessly integrate modern applications with its legacy architecture without custom code, and without having to worry that slow data movement will undermine the investment in new technology.

Major benefits toEightwire’s delivery for AMP include:

• 66% reduction in time to deliver a middleware replacement project
• 80% reduction in time to migrate customer data to a new CRM
• Leveraging a pre-built data exchange to deliver better analytics across the enterprise.

With its legacyconstraints gone, AMP no longer faces any barriers to digital transformation.The business is now able to accelerate its adoption of new technologies,starting with new CRM and analytics tools. Over the horizon, technologies suchas AI and machine learning are now possible with a single customer record thatcan be linked across the rest of the organisation.

With the Eightwire solution in place, data feeds from legacy systems are no longer a barrier to digital transformation.