Overview
Vital Forsikring ASA is Norway's largest privately owned life and pension insurance company. After merging with Gjensidige NOR Spareforsikring ASA in 2004, the company reached total assets of NOK 229 billion (US$41 million) at the end of June 2007.

The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of the DnB NOR Group ASA, the largest financial services group in Norway. The Group handles the payment flow for more than half of Norway's foreign trade, acts as the principal bankers for 60 percent of Norway's 300 largest companies, and also owns Norway's largest asset management operations.

Vital's business model is to develop, sell and provide insurance and savings products to companies, public enterprises, local authorities, associations and individual clients. Vital provides life and pension insurance products to more than 1,000,000 individual customers, while also covering the insurance requirements of more than 20,000 corporate clients.

New Legislation Driving Market Opportunities
In 2006, Vital made the strategic decision to build its new core pension system using SOA to better capitalize on pension legislation that was to come into effect in 2007. The new legislation meant that all Norwegian employees, whether working in the private or public sector, would have an occupational pension scheme. The legislation was expected to increase the number of pension subscribers through a new collective pension offered to companies and employees. Vital wanted to capture a large part of this emerging market. However, doing so called for delivering a variety of services faster, more affordably, with greater customer self service and the ability to scale quickly.

Rolf Nergaard, Enterprise Architect for Vital Forsikring ASA, and his team had been experimenting with Web services since 2001. Foreseeing the opportunity to reduce costs and achieve greater agility, the company decided to develop its core pension systems into a full production SOA environment.

"The pending changes to pensions legislation made time-to-market extremely important to us," said Nergaard. "Our existing mainframe-based IT environment was too expensive. Every time we wanted to change, update or integrate our systems, we would incur significant cost, which made bringing new services to market extremely difficult. We had also been through a couple of mergers and acquisitions in the past and needed to rationalize our systems in order to capitalize on market changes and commercial opportunities."

The company has a growing number of SOA-based applications, including Personal Insurance, more commonly known as worker's compensation, analysis tools to calculate simulated pension payouts, payments for pension payouts, as well as a system for quoting new business.

The SOA Management Mandate
Vital recognized that to do SOA reliably they'd need to monitor and manage their loosely coupled systems. Following a thorough evaluation of available solutions, Vital chose AmberPoint as its enterprise SOA management system. AmberPoint's software is based on the industry's first fully distributed architecture for SOA governance. Key components include agents, analytical servers and management consoles — all Web services-based and built from the ground up to operate in a distributed fashion.

AmberPoint's SOA Management System uses a ground-breaking policy-based management approach that helps organisations gain better, more adaptive end-to-end control of evolving services-based applications. This is achieved by dynamically implementing governance and security policies in the runtime environment.

Vital is using AmberPoint's exception handling, service level management, security and service network monitoring capabilities to ensure the health and well-being of its rapidly growing SOA landscape. With AmberPoint, Vital gains end-to-end visibility into and control of the components comprising its SOA applications. For example, if a service stops responding, Vital's Operations teams know about it instantly and can track the root cause to remedy the issue. The company is also using AmberPoint’s SOA Validation System, which enables them to dry-run system changes in a staging environment by capturing and replaying the interactions of the production SOA environment.

"A Perfect Fit" – AmberPoint and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager
Vital runs its SOA applications on the Microsoft .NET platform, and therefore mandated that its SOA management system run in the same environment in order to avoid the issue of maintaining multiple platforms. Management of Vital's platform is maintained by an external service provider, but Vital maintains all of the applications itself. The IT systems for Vital’s new pensions system include Microsoft .NET 2.0, 64-bit Windows, Microsoft BizTalk Server and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007 running alongside AmberPoint's runtime governance software.

"AmberPoint complements System Center Operations Manager perfectly," said Jan Ingar Trangen, Head of Technology Development for Vital Forsikring ASA. "Between the two, we will be able to monitor and manage across all of our enterprise systems and reduce the complexity of our distributed environment. The ease of change and increased flexibility provided by our SOA approach will make a significant commercial impact on our operations and our ability to reliably and rapidly deliver new services to the market. We think we will gain a competitive advantage from this initiative."

31% More Market Share
The agility of our new pension system enabled us to capture a significant portion of the market when the new legislation came into effect in November 2007," added Nergaard. "As of February 2008, we have been able to capture 31 percent more market share. One of the reasons for this success is our new IT systems enable us to react quickly and cost effectively to new market opportunities."

The majority of Vital's customers are now administered in the new pensions system, which handles both large pension schemes with big throughput files, as well as smaller companies that access the system through a portal. The Norwegian Postal Services, which includes 20,000 employees, was the first pensions customer administered in the new system.

Vital now has 20,427 pension agreements from corporate customers and 237,487 members in the new pension application. In total, Vital has 1.5 million customers (companies and individuals) stored in its customer database.

"AmberPoint has made it easy for us to manage our higher volume of new business," concluded Nergaard. "The management capabilities enable us to see problems before they can impact our customers. We can also see potential bottlenecks early and are able to take action to avoid performance problems or faults. With AmberPoint we can pinpoint problems at the service level. This has saved us both downtime and unnecessary outages. Moving forward, we will expand our use of AmberPoint to take advantage of even more of its capabilities."