Thélem assurances wanted greater flexibility and speed in serving customers and completing internal information- processing tasks, and more compute power to meet Solvency II requirements.

1. IBM Systems and Technology
Case Study
Insurance
Thélem assurances
boosts performance
and cuts costs
With an IBM Power Systems solution
Overview
The need
Thélem assurances wanted greater
flexibility and speed in serving customers
and completing internal information-
processing tasks, and more compute
power to meet Solvency II requirements.
The solution
Worked with IBM and Overlap to
replace eight HP servers with two
IBM Power 770 servers, each with eight
six-core POWER7 processors running at
3.5 GHz and 384 GB memory.
The benefit
Improved transactional performance by
20 percent; improved batch performance
by up to 300 percent; eliminated
requirement for twice-yearly downtime;
extended working day by one hour;
gained new flexibility.
Headquartered in Chécy, France, Thélem assurances is a mutual
insurance company. Its products are aimed at private individuals, farmers,
self-employed professionals and small businesses. The product range
includes health, accident and life insurance, home, auto and equipment
insurance, and personal and professional liability insurance. Thélem
assurances has 260 branches, 362 direct employees and a further 1,200 in
intermediaries, and currently manages more than 760,000 policies.
The insurance market is constantly evolving, as customers demand a
broader range of more flexible products, and as insurers look to tailor
their offers to new requirements. Thélem assurances wanted to match the
pace of external evolution: although it is one of the oldest enterprises in
France, the company aims always to have the flexibility and responsive-
ness of a start-up.
François Tapin, Director of IT and Central Services, says: “Our PA-RISC
technology servers lacked the flexibility to allow us to address changing
customer requirements. It was also becoming increasingly difficult to
guarantee a level of service that met our business requirements, particu-
larly when it came to performance. We needed more compute power and
higher availability, and we also wanted to reduce our energy and cooling
costs.”
With its PA-RISC technology servers, Thélem assurances had to shut
down transaction processing twice a year to free up system capacity for
large information-processing batch jobs. Equally, standard overnight
batch jobs were taking so long to run that they were beginning to eat into
the working day. Many Thélem assurances branches are open for business
six or even seven days a week, from 7am to 8pm, so the company needed
a more powerful server platform that would ensure full availability of
business systems during its extended working hours.

2. 2
IBM Systems and Technology Insurance
Case Study
“We can create new
systems on demand - the
virtualization at the
heart of our new
IBM Power servers
enables us to provide new
application environments
whenever we need them.”
—François Tapin, Director of IT and Central
Services, Thélem assurances
Says François Tapin: “We needed more computational power, and wanted
to avoid the cost and potential risk of having to modify our data center.
So the new solution needed to be both more powerful and more efficient.
IBM immediately took up the challenge, and has provided a solution that
perfectly corresponds to our requirements.”
Flexible virtualized solution
Thélem assurances worked with Overlap, an IBM Premier Business
Partner in France, and with the IBM Products and Solutions Support
Center in Montpellier to evaluate and accept the proposed IBM Power
Systems™ solution. In just ten weeks, the combined team decommis-
sioned the eight existing HP servers, which had a total of 51 processors
and 451 GB of memory, replacing them with two IBM Power 770
servers.
The Power 770s each have eight six-core 3.5 GHz IBM POWER7®
processors and 384 GB of DDR3 memory, and run an average of
17 AIX® logical partitions. Using the Live Partition Mobility feature of
IBM PowerVM™, Thélem assurances can freely move running virtual
systems from one physical server to another to meet changing demand
patterns or to enable physical maintenance without downtime. Equally,
the ability to allocate virtualized server resources instantly and flexibly to
different applications running in different partitions enables Thélem
assurances to provide better customer service.
“We can create new systems on demand - the virtualization at the heart
of our new IBM Power servers enables us to provide new application
environments whenever we need them,” says François Tapin. “The
IBM Power 770 servers bring us power, flexibility and agility. They are
also very compact, and have significantly reduced our electricity and air
conditioning costs. Thanks to that, we were able to reallocate some of our
server budget to meet our requirements for more disk storage capacity.”
Dedicated support
Overlap offered support throughout the project, from the installation of
the machines and skills-transfer, through to the migration and adaptation
of business software. Thélem assurances financed the solution through
IBM Global Financing, which enabled the company to extend its

3. 3
IBM Systems and Technology Insurance
Case Study
Solution components:
Software
● IBM® AIX®
● IBM PowerVM™
Servers
● IBM Power® 770
Services
● IBM Global Financing
● IBM Global Technology Services
IBM Business Partner
● Overlap Business Partner
purchasing power and align project costs with anticipated benefits.
IBM Global Technology Services provides ongoing support services for
the Power Systems servers.
“During negotiations and throughout the project, IBM made it clear that
it wanted to work with us in the medium and long term,” says François
Tapin. “IBM demonstrated that it is prepared to address our challenges
and is capable of responding within the allocated budgets and deadlines.
Having a partner like IBM, which has mastered both the technology and
the financing, is extremely helpful in terms of our ability to manage IT.
Together with Overlap, IBM has developed a perfect solution for our
business challenge and has shown that it is a partner for the long term.”
Tangible benefits
By migrating to the IBM Power 770 servers, Thélem assurances gained
exceptional performance for processor-intensive workloads, advanced
availability features that protect against unplanned downtime, seamless
modular scalability, and advanced virtualization capabilities.
“With IBM Power Systems, we’ve seen a clear 20 percent improvement
in our transaction processing performance, and we’ve been able to extend
our service period by an hour a day - that’s a big deal for our sales force,”
says François Tapin. “We’ve also improved batch performance by
40 percent minimum, and by up to 300 percent for the largest jobs.
We no longer need to shut down transactions to handle our two large
annual jobs, so the sales force can continue to serve client needs during
that time.”
As a European insurer, Thélem assurances will be required to comply
with the Solvency II regulations from 2013 onwards. These are aimed at
creating a more consistent standard for insurers across Europe, and
ensuring that capital requirements more accurately reflect the risks being
accepted. Compliance with Solvency II will require reporting on complex
calculations involving large data sets.
“We need to be able to access more computational power on demand,
particularly in the light of the Solvency II regulations, which will
require a great deal of computational power,” says François Tapin.
“The IBM Power Systems infrastructure is a genuine competitive advan-
tage for Thélem assurances.”

4. Please Recycle
For more information
Contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit
us at: ibm.com/systems
For more information about Thélem assurances, visit:
www.thelem-assurances.fr
For more information about Overlap, visit: www.overlap.fr
Additionally, financing solutions from IBM Global Financing can enable
effective cash management, protection from technology obsolescence,
improved total cost of ownership and return on investment. Also, our
Global Asset Recovery Services help address environmental concerns with
new, more energy-efficient solutions. For more information on
IBM Global Financing, visit: ibm.com/financing
© Copyright IBM Corporation 2011
IBM Systems and Technology Group
Route 100
Somers, New York 10589
U.S.A.
Produced in the United States of America
March 2011
All Rights Reserved
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POC03055-USEN-01