Swiss Company Proved Value of Services Architecture Before the Name Was Even Coined

Wow, that’s us :-)

I am very excited and proud to announce you that Edward Cone (contributing editor at Wired magazine; a senior writer for Inter@ctive Week; an opinion columnist for Greensboro News & Record; a freelancer covering business, technology, and a wide variety of other stuff; and a staff writer at Forbes) – Oh Ed, I haven’t known that you have a blog… – interviewed us end of 2005 for CIO Insight.

His article about the ecenter, called Insuring the future, is really great, thanks a lot Ed for your time and your great challenging questions! Have a look ;-) You can find the whole article here.

Before all the hype over service-oriented architecture, before the cumbersome acronym had been coined, and before the now infamous Microsoft memos were sent, one small insurance company in Switzerland had a big head start. Helvetia Patria Group, a St. Gallen, Switzerland-based insurance company put its service-oriented architecture in place four years ago, before anyone even knew what to call it. […]

Built on an electronic banking platform from Hewlett-Packard Co., with assistance from H-P consultants, the Helvetia Patria eBusiness Center makes more than two dozen products available on line. The company says it has realized a return on investment of 111 percent in the system’s first three years, and anticipates a six-year return of 201 percent.

Actually, the ROI study was done by a neutral external specialized company called Thoughware Worldwide. You can find an Executive Summary of this study here. We had really a great time during this study with Tim, Jacob, Fotios and Rose-Marie, thank you all ;-)