Bajaj Allianz
Case study | Bajaj Allianz
Challenge
Database upgrade
Formodernnancialservicescompanies,
IT is their lifeblood. Few industries depend
on technology quite so heavily for their
day-to-day operations, and to keep their
customers happy.
Bajaj Allianz, one of India’s biggest insurance
businesses, is no exception. The company
is organized into two main groups: general
insurance and life insurance. For the life
insurance division, its policy issuance system –
the core of its business – is based on database
software from Oracle, with Oracle Forms and
Java used to build front ends. Bajaj Allianz has
an in-house development team that creates its
own Oracle-based applications.
Bajaj Allianz was using version 10g of Oracle
for its life insurance division, but it faced the
need to upgrade to version 11i. The existing
version was nearing the end of its life
and support from Oracle was scheduled
tonish.Also,BajajAllianzhadaround
4,000 concurrent users on its database,
located across India, and Oracle
recommended the upgrade to improve
performance for this large number
of users.
While the new version of Oracle was expected
todeliverperformanceandeciency
improvements, Bajaj Allianz wanted to be sure.
It needed to benchmark the performance of
its existing software and compare it to the
planned new version to check if performance
and availability would in fact improve, and to
minimize the risk of the upgrade.
“We have a huge database, with a huge list of
customers and transactions, and we wanted to
do performance testing before the upgrade,”
says Raj Kamal Pal, manager at Bajaj Allianz.
“We were not sure what the performance
would be if we upgraded the database.”
Bajaj Allianz was also concerned due to the
previous experience with upgradations.
Solution
Number one in testing
To solve these challenges, Bajaj Allianz
decided to use HP Performance Center
running on a SaaS platform, which provides
software testing tools to investigate and verify
application performance.
2