About our Client
The client provides financially stable insurance products to its customers. Being in business for over 60 years, it has enhanced the process of buying insurance and annuity products. It delivers outstanding performance and believes in service beyond expectation. In September 2018 the client announced its partnership with FAST, a leading digital platform, making itself the first insurance company to be entirely cloud-based. By introducing new technology and a forward-thinking business model, this insurance and security corporation has transformed the experience of buying insurance. From the processes being time-consuming, complicated, and stressful the company has made it simple, fast, and easy. Programmers.io has helped this client to tackle its issues related to IBM i platform and provided long lasting solutions for the same.
The Challenge
Our client’s ERP runs on IBM i and it is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service to store its data. AWS Cloud was used for this process because:
- It offers a complete range of services to store, access, govern and analyze data
- It provides reduced costs, increased agility and simplified storage management
- It makes it simple and fast to move large amounts of data online between on-premises storage
The data stored by the client on AWS included files related to banking such as Commission statement files, EFT (Electronic Funds Transfer) Premium files, GL (General Ledger) etc. The client used to extract these files and created dynamic folders on AWS for its daily processes. As these daily processes of the client ran on the IBM i platform, the major concern of the client was to access the data on AWS cloud from AS400 IBM i.
The Solution
01.
The developers from Programmers.io first discussed all the requirements of the client and prepared an approach to modernize the website by using existing codes.
02.
Discussing the solutions with the client, we decided to opt java as a solution. Main reasons that led to this choice are:
- The IBM i platform supports Java widely and provides a JDK to run java applications on their System.
- AWS provides AWS SDK for java which helps take the complexity out of coding by providing Java APIs for AWS services.
03.
Our team of java experts created a java utility by using AWS provided APIs to access the data on AWS cloud and copy those files to IFS (File directory Offered by IBM i). As a result, processes on IBM i could call our java utility to copy the data on IFS and access data with Java easily.
