Business Opportunity: Customer purchased a portfolio of life insurance policies that allowed policyholders to lock in market return rates at anniversary, creating a significant financial risk. The customer had developed a complex investment model to mitigate the risk, but without automation it was of little value.

Our Role: Vision Technologies designed the system, served as the technical team leader for its development and coded its most complex components.

This system features parallel processing, publish/subscribe event architecture, error handling and reporting. Out-of-process servers were used to reformat, archive, age and group data, to create mark to market modeling with shock thresholds, monitor database integrity, and to create multi-threaded asynchronous data updates. We developed and implemented the Enterprise JavaBean strategy for the application. We also wrote a Windows NT Service to query the Service Control Manager for monitoring and logging run states at user-defined intervals.

Outcome: A fully automated hedging application that analyzes 200 different market scenarios each night and feeds real time updates during trading hours. Prior to our work, this financial model required 16 PCs to run for 12 hours each and had many points of failure. It now runs on one server in 8 hours and is scalable for exponential growth without significant performance impact.

Technologies: Enterprise JavaBeans, BEA WebLogic, Microsoft Visual Basic, DCOM, Microsoft ADO.

Business Opportunity: Improve understanding of customer base, overall customer service, and call center productivity.

Our Role: Vision Technologies designed the object model and developed the middleware for the application. The system featured business object data transfer, object brokering, error handling and reporting, and CICS DB2 and SQL Server data storage and retrieval. Our work also included delivering a utility for remote, unattended application upgrades; delivering components for ASCII to EBCDIC data translation (one million characters converted in less than one second).

Outcome: A system that provides the company with a consolidated profile of each customer and significantly enhanced call center functionality and efficiency.

Technologies: Microsoft Visual Basic, COM/DCOM, Win32 API.