Prudential UK is deploying the Progress Fuse enterprise service bus (ESB) in its annuities business unit as a first step in making its IT infrastructure more agile and flexible, while simultaneously automating procedures. This initial stage in the technology refresh uses the Fuse ESB product to integrate complex back-end systems, enabling automated processing to support its annuities calculations, cross-referencing, record checking and so forth.

The new back-end processing infrastructure at Prudential UK, based around the Progress Fuse ESB open source technology, gives the life and pensions provider a suite of reusable web services that can calculate projected returns for different annuity products. These services connect to diverse back-end systems including databases, WebSphere MQ, and third party services. Building on this initial first phase success, Prudential is now beginning to adopt the Progress Fuse Message Broker product as well, to provide messaging.

The Fuse ESB product supports OSGI, a standards-based framework for Java development, providing Prudential with a simple way in which to manage service lifecycles, dependencies and versioning, and delivering a coherent IT architecture.

“We have an ongoing stream of work that requires suitable, sustainable technology in order for us to deliver that work,” explains Tim Milbourne, lead IT architect at Prudential UK. “The Progress Fuse ESB product has an open, standards-based model that will support our needs both now and in the future.”

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