SOURCE: Xcalia

October 09, 2006 08:07 ET

Generali Selects Xcalia® as Strategic Vendor for Data Integration and Management

Solution Provides Fast and Easy Data Access and Improves Application Performance

PARIS AND PALO ALTO, CA -- (MARKET WIRE) -- October 9, 2006 -- Xcalia, a leading provider of dynamic integration software, announced today that it has been selected as a strategic technology vendor by Generali, a global insurance provider based in Switzerland. Generali has chosen to use Xcalia Intermediation for data integration and management to increase the ease, time to deployment, and performance of business applications. Xcalia maps services with enterprise data and information resources regardless of the content, location, platform or programming language. It sits between the business and data layers to dynamically compose applications and execute transactions at runtime.

Generali is a leading retail insurer providing insurance services in the area of life and non-life. To keep pace with the competitive pressure in the market, Generali is committed to continual technology innovation to offer more Web-based applications to keep their loyal customers and agents happy. To do so, Generali made a decision to move to SOA using Web services. One of the first problems they needed to solve was how to manage heterogenous data in a host of new business applications.

Its previous data management solution had been internally developed and needed to be upgraded because it could not scale to meet the changing business demands. It was not based on industry standards and was too expensive to maintain. Generali decided on a new data model with a layer of abstraction between the application and the data that was able to connect directly to objects. And it was important that this model would enable seamlessly integration with other infrastructure components like IBM WebSphere and Oracle. After rigorous evaluation, the decision was made to use the Xcalia Intermediation Core (XIC) to meet these challenges.

With Xcalia, Generali doesn't need to change the application logic and can now migrate data into usable formats much quicker and easier than other alternatives. And, because data and service mapping with Xcalia is configured and not coded, Generali was able to deliver solutions faster with fewer resources. The result was higher customer satisfaction and increased revenues without additional cost. By the end of 2006, 85% of Genarali Insurance branches and 25% of the contracts will be managed through XIC. All other contracts will be migrated in 2007.

"We are really happy with Xcalia. The product functionality and the performance benefits are great and the team was so responsive; I have never seen anything like it before!" said Marc Abbt, CIO of Generali Switzerland. "As we continue with new SOA-based initiatives, Xcalia intermediation will help us improve our business intelligence and compliance management systems and better integrate redundant processes and systems globally. We can keep our legacy applications but use common services to pull together the important data from different systems as new composite applications. We are migrating our mainframes to distributed applications and Xcalia will help us easily access and reuse these valuable assets."

About Xcalia

Xcalia provides dynamic integration software for agile enterprises to easily create transactional composite applications. Our unique intermediation approach enables unified, real-time access to heterogenous data and services. Intermediation is adaptive and configurable so application changes can be made quickly and cost effectively without impacting the underlying systems or infrastructure. Xcalia is ideal for high-performance business environments that must preserve transactional application capabilities while reusing information resources in a service-oriented way. Xcalia, headquartered in Paris, France, has offices in the US and Germany and over 50 enterprise customers globally. The company is privately held. For more on Xcalia, visit www.xcalia.com.

Xcalia, Xcalia Intermediation Core and the Xcalia logo are registered trades of Xcalia.