Control-M Helps AG Insurance Prepare for the Future with Application Replatforming

In business for almost two centuries, AG Insurance is one of the largest Belgian insurance companies and a leader in the life insurance and non-life insurance markets. It serves over three million individual and business customers through distribution and broker channels that include banks such as BNP Paribas Fortis. In Belgium, almost one of every two households, one of every seven cars, and one of every four companies is covered by AG Insurance.

To maintain its market leadership, AG Insurance is focused on customer and competitive differentiation, adding products and experiences to make it the best choice for customers, distributors, and brokers. The organization has embarked on an ambitious and complex replatforming modernization project to migrate from its mainframe to Windows servers. This will better position the company to respond to customer needs and execute future digital projects more quickly.

Control-M, the market-leading application and data workflow orchestration platform from BMC, has been integral to this transformation. AG Insurance has a long history with BMC and Control-M, initially deploying the solution on the mainframe, where it has played a business-critical role orchestrating all of the organization’s application and data workflows in a stable, reliable, and efficient manner.

As part of the replatforming project, AG Insurance migrated more than 80 million lines of code through Micro Focus application modernization solutions. Not only was the application code migrated; mainframe assets including data, products, and utilities were completely migrated to distributed systems. Control-M and its artifacts were also migrated to the new platform. To minimize risks and facilitate planning and implementation, the migration was accomplished through several sequential iterations, each with its own testing and validation cycles. 

During the iterative application migration process, Control-M was essential to the testing of parallel workflows, including migrated and non-migrated applications across the mainframe and the new distributed platform, and verifying that the business results they produced remained identical. All of the replatformed applications and data workflows were then loaded into and tested extensively by Control-M, which de-risked the entire migration process and facilitated the cutover decision. The cutover from the mainframe to distributed servers was done in just one weekend. 

The replatforming project was a strategic investment for AG Insurance to help it modernize, innovate, and grow based on a completely new technological environment. Due to its business criticality and to take advantage of an experienced support team, the company subscribed to the BMC Advantage program. With this partnership in place, BMC experts worked hand in hand with the insurer to understand its projects and objectives, analyze the environment, and deliver appropriate and timely help and support.

Control-M continues to be the strategic orchestration framework driving all of AG Insurance’s applications and data workflows and enabling new possibilities.

The organization is starting to leverage additional Control-M capabilities, opening access to new teams, including developers and business users, through the Control-M Automation API. This will allow the company to use Control-M to orchestrate cloud data services going forward.

Self-service is another area where AG Insurance is taking advantage of Control-M, using the platform to progressively decentralize tasks and responsibilities across the organization. Control-M offers enhanced self-service user experiences and expands the visibility of the orchestration framework so developers and other users can monitor the progress of workflows and explore outputs and logs on their own, without submitting service requests to IT operations.

To continuously meet customer expectations, AG Insurance looks forward to taking advantage of that accelerated workflow evolution and execution and implementing new data-driven initiatives and other projects with Control-M asthe modern, agile foundation to support them in the future.