Solution
IT Infrastructure and Applications
Industry
Insurance
Company
A leading insurance provider in the United States with more than 15,000 agents.
Business challenge
The company’s agents had been using more than 100 green screen, mainframe-based tools to perform their jobs for years. To modernize the tools for their agents, the company invested $125M in a Salesforce application. However, after implementation, it was discovered that the Salesforce application could not perform all functions of their legacy tools. The agents now had to print out their activities using Salesforce and then use the older green screen tools to complete their daily work. The company was faced with a long and expensive development project to add missing functionality to the Salesforce application.
Transition
A pilot project demonstrated the potential to modernize the company’s range of green screen tools and successfully integrate them with the Salesforce application. However, a further problem was encountered during the pilot – how to provide single-sign-on (SSO) access to the solution.
It was determined that IBM Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) could provide the seamless integration with Salesforce, handling the display of green screen data capture, and its Web Express Logon (WEL) component could provide the SSO access that the company needed to ensure success and acceptance.
Deployment
The HATS WEL SSO project was completed in only 6 weeks from beginning to end.
The company’s engineering team supported the HATS architect to identify important components of the HATS WEL SSO project, including:
The solution included recommendations for sizing, architecture, deployment, and testing.
Result
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Immediate results only a few weeks after engagement of the HATS team.
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Users (who are pre-authenticated by the Salesforce application) can log in to the application. This is made possible by the WEL component providing SSO functionality.
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Agents perform their tasks easily in the application, which appears like Salesforce.
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The company’s $125M investment in Salesforce has been saved, with a small additional cost and in very little time.
Solution components
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IBM Host Access Transformation Services (HATS)
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IBM z/OS Connect providing RESTful APIs to and from the mainframe
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IBM WebSphere Application Server Liberty
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Salesforce application
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Legacy green screen applications, including IBM CICS transactions providing conversation between business logic, users, display logic, and more.
- OpenAM
Learn more about IBM’s Host Access Transformation Services (HATS) at https://www.ibm.com/products/host-access-transformation-services and https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/hats
Learn about HATS Web Express Logon component (WEL) at https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/hats/9.7.0?topic=logon-using-web-express-wel
Discover and engage with the IBM HACP & HATS User Group at https://community.ibm.com/community/user/ibmz-and-linuxone/groups/community-home?CommunityKey=02ca7e54-2793-4fe1-867f-786e27caaac6 in the IBM Z and LinuxONE Community.