IBM and Taiyo Life Insurance and T&D Information System today announced that the companies have built a virtual client environment in order to improve the operational workflow of Taiyo Life Insurance by utilizing the IBM Smart Business Desktop. The new environment began operation on July 20, 2010.

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Taiyo Life Insurance developed an application for mission critical operations, called "operational work flow." The application integrates insurance operations from new contract creation and maintenance to payment.

Aiming to streamline the management and maintenance of IT assets and further enhance security, Taiyo Life Insurance, in conjunction with IBM, built a desktop cloud environment to virtualize the client environment on servers. This desktop cloud will be utilized for approximately 1,500 personal computers (PCs) dedicated to administration operations that implement the operational work flow.

The use of the desktop cloud environment provides automatic updates to all related client environments when one application adds a new function; and will eliminate the use of update releases for all the sites and a separate configuration process on each PC. The desktop cloud environment will only require an update on the virtual desktop environment via the server, and the data will be managed over the secure data center servers and no longer stored on the client side. By utilizing the desktop cloud environment, Taiyo Life Insurance has experienced even stronger security.

In addition, Taiyo Life Insurance and T&D Information System, which develops business applications for Taiyo Life Insurance, established a process to outsource some system development operations to Dalian, China, in order to enhance development capability, streamline system development, and reduce cost. When system development operations are shared with overseas engineers and executed concurrently to optimize development cost and period, development capability can be enhanced.

Taiyo Life Insurance and T&D Information System developed a desktop cloud environment within its data center in Japan to execute system development operations in China. By accessing from thin client terminals in China, the company realized high level security, cost reduction, as well as efficient development capability enhancement. Its desktop cloud environment for development operations in China has been in operation since May 2010.

In the future, Taiyo Life Insurance plans to expand target operational areas of the desktop cloud environment.

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  Aliza Fischer, IBM Media Relations
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  afische@us.ibm.com

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SOURCE: IBM Corporation