Delta Lloyd Germany has announced it is using Perforce, the Fast Software Configuration Management (SCM) system, to manage its move to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environment. Perforce was chosen for its functionality, scalability, integration with third party technologies and strong customer support.

Perforce is an important part of the Delta Lloyd “Replacement Host” project, the goal of which is to completely switch its existing mainframe applications to SOA. This IT project is driven by the company’s progression from a provider of insurance products into a financial services provider, and by the need to support users outside the company’s main offices.

Delta Lloyd needed to implement more flexible IT systems based on SOA, which decouples systems and applications and makes them available via the Web. To transition to SOA and to make its applications available online at all times, the company needed to redevelop its mainframe-based COBOL applications using J2EE and C++ on Linux.

“By providing business functions as web services, we can share them across a number of sectors and make them available via the web. This saves us time and money,” says Dr. Veronika Simons, member of the board and CIO at Delta Lloyd Germany. “And it’s why we have been steadily replacing the existing mainframe applications with new object-oriented applications developed in Java and C++ for a number of years now.”

“Perforce is a central element in the management of this major development project,“ explains Christian Konrad, system engineer at Delta Lloyd.

A key benefit to using Perforce is reduced development time for new applications. ”The 70 developers at Delta Lloyd have used Perforce since 2002, not only for the versioning of classic source code but also for documentation and build scripts. Perforce is also used as the developers’ front-end for Delta Lloyd’s centralised build management system based on CruiseControl,” he adds.

“Thanks to Perforce we were able to reorganise the software lifecycle and reduce development times as a result. Today, every developer is convinced of the benefits of Perforce.”