Legacy Encapsulation

The Siebel Financial Services application can serve as either a front-end administration system or as a back-end CRM information storing system. In either case, it is necessary for the Siebel Financial Services application to integrate with one or more multi-channel back-end systems such as an Insurance Policy Administration System. To achieve this, the Siebel Financial Services application must be configured to subscribe, receive, and then filter out the necessary information to store in the database. The goal of integration is to make the communication possible between systems that have not been designed to communicate together.

In allowing communications between systems, many different approaches have been developed. Among these, messaging architecture is widely used and supported by the industry. For example, message oriented middleware, such as IBM's MQSFSE, provides cross-referencing functionality for all the applications. MQSFSE provides the connecting avenue between source or front-end systems with target or legacy systems. Many customers in the financial services business face the same business problem of how to connect new front-end applications for CRM or Enterprise applications with existing legacy applications that were designed for a different business model.

Many of these integration problems are addressed by a relatively small number of key business processes that are implemented in most organizations. Companies such as IBM have encapsulated their experience and expertise in the Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) organization. In a similar effort, large insurance and banking organizations introduced ACORD (Association for Operations Research Development) and IFX (Interactive Financial Exchange) standards. These standards provide the definition of key data elements of insurance and financial services, business components, and the interfaces to these components using XML messages.

With the Siebel Financial Services connectors provided, the Siebel CRM platform generates and processes the necessary request and response expected in an encapsulated environment for legacy integration to support both inbound and outbound real-time integration between Siebel applications and other applications.

This encapsulation architecture provided in Siebel Financial Services encompasses the Siebel Call Center application, as shown in the following image.