Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Database In-Memory Enable Swiss Insurance Leader to Modernize its Database Infrastructure and Speed up Business Analytics

In order to consolidate its IT architecture and improve the performance of its applications, Swiss insurance leader Swiss Mobiliar has selected Oracle Database 12c to serve as its strategic database.

In 2014, Swiss Mobiliar, which provides home, car, accident, and risk management insurance and other financial services to more than 1.7 million Swiss individuals and businesses, found itself at a crossroad: With a long history of successful mergers and acquisitions, it had also built up a complex and unwieldy IT infrastructure. With various databases, mainframe and server technologies from a multitude of vendors, as well as a wide range of legacy COBOL applications, Swiss Mobiliar realized this infrastructure would no longer scale to support the company’s long-term growth plans. As a result, the company sought to find the right database to support its strategy and selected Oracle Database 12c.

Swiss Mobiliar overhauled and modernized its database infrastructure by consolidating onto Oracle Database 12c and extending the product’s capabilities with the Oracle Database In-Memory option for real-time analytics. With Oracle Database In-Memory’s ease of adoption, no application changes or fine-tuning were required to deliver analytics within minutes. Its native ability to process data at a rate of billions of rows per second enabled Swiss Mobiliar to provide reports critical to its daily operations and customers in a few seconds, compared to the traditional processing time of days or weeks.

“Executing mergers and acquisitions is often an integral part of growing a successful business, but it definitely has the potential to create significant IT headaches,” said Jochen Maas, head of base service, IT operations, Swiss Mobiliar. “By implementing Oracle Database 12c as our strategic database, we were able to streamline and modernize our database solution, and move away from our prior bloated and complex architecture. As a result, we’ve been able to improve application performance and speed up daily operations, which enables us to align to our long-term growth plans and deliver a better customer experience.”

In order to prove the performance benefits of Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Database In-Memory, Swiss Mobiliar conducted a proof of concept to test the solutions in three different database scenarios that were typical of the firm’s current operations. The first scenario simulated the entry of a new customer’s information into a sales data warehouse; the second scenario consisted of testing Oracle Database In-Memory on a new executive data warehouse that was under construction; and the third scenario tested how Swiss Mobiliar’s 20-year-old risk management system would perform on Oracle Database In-Memory. In all three scenarios, Oracle out-performed Swiss Mobiliar’s previous database architecture, and was up to 200x faster in the third scenario.

“As organizations such as Swiss Mobiliar evolve and grow, they are faced with the challenge of determining how to progress from their older legacy technologies,” said Maria Colgan, master product manager, Oracle. “With Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Database In-Memory, Swiss Mobiliar was able to start that crucial transition to consolidate its multiple databases and create a much more streamlined architecture than with the previous model. This in turn delivered the multiple benefits of enhanced application performance, faster daily operations and the ability for Swiss Mobiliar to track towards its business growth goals.”

Swiss Mobiliar’s risk management application is the first to go into production with Oracle Database In-Memory. The company plans to activate Oracle Database In-Memory based on the experience made with Oracle databases, for the other applications tested, in the next deployment phase.