In-Depth
Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.
It may sound simple, but it is a way of bringing potential customers browsing a Web site into the fold. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co. of New York has developed an automobile insurance quotation application for their Web site.
With a legacy system in place for years, a large majority of developers familiar with Cobol products from Microfocus Inc., MetLife decided to use the vendor’s NetExpress tool develop this application, said Alex Zadronzy, manager of distributed computing tools at MetLife. "We needed to have a lot of the mainframe business logic at the PC/Internet level," explained Zadronzy. With NetExpress, MetLife’s developers were able to reuse the existing mainframe code while generating new front-end screens for the presentation layer. The auto insurance quotation system is only available for a few states. Nationwide rollout can be expected some time this year, said Zadronzy.