Churchill Insurance adopts HPCN

The average advert retains public attention in a business sense for only 10 minutes. If the viewer does not phone then the message is lost. On average Churchill staff deal with 67,000 enquiries, and dispatch 38,000 printed letters with over 100 thousand pages every 24 hours, seven days a week. Customer enquiries have to be completed within 2.5 minutes otherwise the customer loses interest. The faster the enquiry is completed the higher the chance for the customer to buy. It also saves Churchill both on numbers of on-line staff and telephone charges. With Churchill's success other companies jumped on the gravy train and now this market is getting saturated. How does one run a successful business of this kind? This is another example where HPCN becomes a core element of the business operation.

Those of you who watch British commercial television could not have failed to see the advertisement run by Churchill Insurance. It displays a smug looking bull-dog on the screen and a voice of a man articulates the worries a potential insurance customer has as to whether one has to do this and that or needs to fill lots of forms in order to buy insurance. The dog smugly shakes its head and reassures the viewer that the process is very easy with no need for all these worries. The advert ends by inviting the viewer to "Give the dog a phone".

After the advert is shown, and in particular during the next 10 minutes, all systems are on full red alert at Churchills. They expect to receive and process around eight to ten thousand phone calls and convert them into on average a 70 thousand pounds business transaction. This average is based on 365 days a year and round the clock, 24 hours a day. How do they do this?

The human on-line telephone operation is understandable. You just have a large enough pool of telephonists to answer queries. The next stage is to get to the stored database information so you just give each telephonist a PC connected on-line to the central machine which manages the database. This database is 80 Gbytes, spread on 3 Terabytes of disk space and requires a large system to manage it.

The Churchill operation generates 18 million Oracle transactions a day and the whole operation has to be duplicated in case of failure. The production dabase has to be backed-up frequently to ensure integrity.

By 1995 Churchill has cornered the household insurance market. Their original IT operation was based on Pyramid machines running Unix and Oracle. With the database growing fast their Pyramids became overloaded and max-out in June of that year. Churchill faced a dillema. It was no good for the bull-dog inviting the viewer to phone if they could not translate the calls into business. A more powerful IT system was becoming a business imperative.

The choices to be made were whether to upgrade to a bigger single server, upgrade to an Oracle parallel server, or change the suplier. The Oracle parallel server tended to crash when used as an on-line screen at that time. Any new supplier system must be Unix SVR4 based running Oracle 7 and be able to handle at least 2,000 users every three minutes. Churchill issued an RFP with this requirement. The vendor options included Meiko, Parsys, Tandem, NCR3600, Sun SC2000, Silicon Graphics, nCube2, Cray CS6400, Encore Infinity and WhiteCross.

A number of the above companies did not even bother to respond to the RFP. From the ones who did only the Cray superserver SC64000 was able to run the benchmark successfully. Churchill went ahead and bought two Cray Systems, one as back-up. In operation a 14 processor Cray CS64000 handles 740 active users in less than 30 seconds.

Advantages of parallel systems

The availability of many processors makes it easy to manage large farms of disks containing the database. Some 80 Gbytes of data has to be backed-up every night. Churchill found that buying two Cray machines solved only half their problem. The other half was how to migrate their database without interrupting their business operations and lose that 7,000 pounds for every minute out of service.

Using a pipe method this operation was done on-line in under a day over a weekend. By Monday the Cray system was able to handle over 700 users on-line. The system turned out to be very reliable with 99.99% up time. Customer queries are dealt within three minutes and documents are dispatched and delivered by next day.

In the insurance business which Churchill is a player, high performance SMP systems are disarable and manageable. Distributed systems are less suitable. There is a need for better database software and cheaper hardware. The hardware is coming soon. For example, since Sun Microsystems bought the Cray superserver business it plans to upgrade their processors. The new product named "starfire" will contain of upto 64 processors and have 10 times the current power. This will be offered at 90% of past cost. The database software is much more problematic.

The key to business success is people. It is critical to have an excellent systems administrator. One who can introduce correct code in the right place; provide dayly updates and inhouse maintenance at affordable costs; and, can recover from a disastrous failure and get back running smooth production.

Dog gets a real fight from other insurance players

Once a business is successful it soon attracts other players chasing the gravy train. This is happening in the insurance business where a number of other players have come in. For example Churchill is slugging it out with another company called Winston. Yes, would you believe it, but with modern PR sound-bite reality is stranger than fiction; it is like a company named Koln slugging it out with Helmut in the German context.

This is already stunting the Churchill growth and I do not know if it is my imagination but the bull-dog on the TV screen does not look as smug any more. Maybe market saturation and familiarity breeds indeference so the public viewer is not picking up the phone to give to give the dog a call.

Chris Lazou