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Oracle Customer Success—Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd.
Swiss Re Doubles Data Warehouse Performance Speed and Reduces Operational Costs Thanks to Engineered Systems Upgrade
ShareBy introducing Oracle Database 12c and upgrading to Oracle Exadata Database Machine X5-2, we doubled our batch processing speed and have come closer to consolidating our IT landscape. Our 4,000 users can now rapidly generate reports—essential for understanding and successfully managing our reinsurance operations.
Swiss Re is a leading and highly diversified global reinsurer, a pioneer in insurance-based capital market solutions that combines financial strength and unparalleled expertise for the benefit of global clients. Founded in 1863, the company has 150 years of experience in providing wholesale re/insurance and risk management solutions, delivering both traditional and innovative offerings in property and casualty (P&C) and life and health (L&H) that meet clients’ needs. Swiss Re is the second largest reinsurer in the world and has attained high grades from ratings agencies—such as the A1 rating granted by Moody’s.
In 2002, Swiss Re established a client markets and products data warehouse to gather reinsurance information across all organizational units in an integrated structure. The data warehouse provided the basis for reporting at the group level with drill-down capability to individual contracts, while facilitating application integration and data exchange by using common data standards. Initially focusing on P&C reinsurance information only, it now includes L&H reinsurance, insurance, and non-life insurance information.
Business Challenge
- Improve the performance of the client markets and products data warehouse that holds 5 terabytes (TB) of reinsurance data and which is relied upon by 4,000 direct and indirect users
- Simplify IT infrastructure through consolidation to reduce operational costs and ease database maintenance and administration
- Increase batch processing speed and enable faster generation of management and end user reports used across the organization—for example to monitor customer payments, analyze reinsurance trends, or track claims payouts
Results
- Consolidated IT infrastructure, reduced operational costs, and increased the efficiency of business-critical client markets and products data warehouse—consisting of 70 inbound and 70 outbound interfaces—by upgrading to Oracle Database 12c and Oracle Exadata Database Machine X5-2
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Simplified IT environment with Oracle Database 12c’s multitenant functionality to achieve total Oracle Database consolidation onto a single platform for both data warehouse and online transaction processing activities—significantly facilitating database administration, and fully aligning with Swiss Re’s IT consolidation strategy
- Boosted processing performance for managing 3 TB of data warehouse data, including 9 billion business records, by running Oracle Database 12c on Oracle Exadata X5-2—enabling 2x faster batch processing
- Achieved solid overall reduction in time to generate reports—for example regarding reinsurance claims activity per product, or overdue payments—and anticipated further performance improvements by using the Autodop feature to generate up-to-the-minute end-user reports from the data warehouse
- Projected significant cost savings by consolidating data and simplifying operational management, and minimized support issues thanks to a single-vendor hardware and software solution covering Swiss Re’s core reinsurance business
- Increased staff motivation and morale considerably, as IT personnel are empowered to work with the most advanced data warehouse technologies, and 4,000 end users enjoy consistently high performance of applications and reporting tools used across multiple reinsurance business units
- Achieved full hardware and software upgrade in less than five months—well within project timeframe and budget—with no serious issues and without requiring staff training thanks to the ease of deployment and intuitive functionality of Oracle Engineered Systems
- Used Oracle Multitenant to deploy an internal data warehouse with 0.2 terabytes and 5 billion rows for reporting, analytics, and cross-charging, leveraging the same hardware
- Deployed an optimized patching solution while ensuring compliance with strict corporate and Swiss government data security policies—for example permitting remote connections only from European Union countries—by leveraging Oracle Platinum Services for patch planning and scheduling and using named engineers from the Oracle Advanced Customer Support Expertise Center to implement the patches with an inbound connection
We have enjoyed a successful long-term partnership with Oracle for our data warehouse, so it was out of the question that we would consider an alternative. Oracle is always at the cutting edge of technology developments, and in addition we receive excellent support that is tailored to our needs.
About Swiss Reinsurance Company Ltd.