Industry Financial Company Taikang Life has 8,000 employees and more than 3.5 million customers. It sells its life, annuity and health policies to consumers via its 120 branch offices and a network of over 150,000 independent agents throughout China. Employees 8,000 IT staff Not available Annual IT Budget Not available

In 2005, it decided to unify its information architecture to provide centralized access to customers and corporate information.

The company's various life insurance businesses relied on several different information management systems--including IBM DB2 Universal Database and IBM Informix Dynamic Server--while running on either IBM eServer iSeries or IBM eServer pSeries hardware platforms.

As the company grew, the different systems operated as separate silos of information, making it difficult to share data among business units. And with its hands full maintaining increasingly complex applications, as well as adding new functionality such as online systems for customers, Taikang's IT team did not have the resources to tackle integrating the disparate corporate systems.

The disparate systems also made producing business reports a time-consuming and labor intensive process. These reports took more than 10 employees two weeks to compile. The fact that the business unit applications were developed using different tools further complicated the environment.

Taikang's business and IT teams performed a thorough internal requirements analysis before evaluating several solutions which could satisfy their needs. In the end, it turned to long-time vendor IBM for help in integrating its silos of data with IBM WebSphere Information Integrator Advanced Edition, Version 8.1.

The software runs on an IBM pSeries 670 system. IBM provided extensive sales and technical support, including local and U.S. teams, to ensure a successful rollout.

Today, WebSphere Information Integrator allows Taikang to consolidate data from disparate database systems into a single central repository--providing easy centralized access to corporate and customer-related data.

According to Wang Daonan, CIO of Taikang Life, the project has led to lower IT costs, faster development of new applications, and improved strategic decision making and business analysis, among other benefits.