Guardian Selects iAnywhere for Wireless

Ardor for implementing wireless applications may have cooled in some quarters, but not at New York-based Guardian Life Insurance Co., which has selected Sybase (Dublin, CA) subsidiary iAnywhere Solutions as the strategic vendor for its wireless agent automation initiative.

Guardian is in the midst of an enterprise component-based architecture build up, a feature of which is to be device and browser agnostic, according to Jaime Sguerra, IT chief architect, Guardian Life. The idea, Sguerra explains, is "to be able to build an application once, and have the capacity to go out to any browsers and wireless." Guardian had already rolled out a unified client view application to give agents Internet access to information about all a client's Guardian policies. "What we're trying to do now is extend this application to a wireless device with alert factors on changes to policy information, so that agents can use it while they're speaking to a client," Sguerra says. "It's a very dynamic way of reaching out to the agents to let them know what's going on with their clients."

Guardian contacted several vendors to seek the means to take the application wireless, and came up with a short list of iAnywhere, IBM (Armonk, NY) 724 Solutions (Toronto). "At the end of the day, we decided iAnywhere was the richest product, to support mobile mail, and building both thin- and fat-client applications," Sguerra says. The agreement includes licensing, maintenance and support for three years. "In addition, we get professional services to help us get this out of the gate as soon as possible," he comments. "We want the vendor to have skin in the game, and to achieve knowledge transfer so that we don't have to bring in consultants again and again." All in all, the deal is worth about $500,000, according to Sguerra.

iAnywhere components incorporated into Guardian's architecture include m-Business Studio and Mail Anywhere Studio, powering a solution tailored to Research in Motion's (Waterloo, ON) Blackberry, Palm Inc.'s (Santa Clara, CA) Palm Pilot and Compaq's (Houston) iPaq handheld wireless devices, Sguerra says.

Guardian recently completed a pilot program of the iAnywhere solution that succeeded under demanding timelines, according to Sguerra. The carrier is moving forward with an incentive plan for adoption of the wireless services the solution enables. "We want to empower our GA's general agents with this and set up a program to encourage them to use it," Sguerra reports.

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio