The insurance firm Hiscox is moving its legacy financial systems to an Oracle-based cloud solution. The goal is to provide a system that can match the company's growth ambitions, according to Ian Penny Group CIO.
"We have a heritage set of financial systems, including Cognos Planning [from IBM], but there is no integrated package," Penny told Computing. "When Hiscox was smaller and less diversified, that was appropriate, now, looking at the company's growth ambitions, we need to transform our technology into finance, so we are moving towards an Oracle solution based on the cloud."
Penny recently joined Computing in her studies to talk about skills, automation and DevOps.
He explained that the off-platform approach based on the cloud is appropriate for administrative functions such as finance.
"There is no competitive advantage to running a financial system a bit better than our competitors, so we are using a commercial approach." To support our growth over the next five to ten years where we expect our client base to increase substantially, we need a robust back office, "he added.
Hiscox analyzed several solutions from organizations, including SAP and Microsoft, when evaluating which financing system to use. Penny explained that the choice was made based on how well he thought each company could keep its promises.
Although Microsoft was not chosen in this instance, Hiscox recently started using its Azure cloud platform.
"The decision was made based on our confidence in the ability of those organizations to execute, some of those partners have an excellent record of execution in smaller or large multinational companies, the kind of financial system you need in a company with 200,000 employees is different from what you need in a smaller set, we chose Oracle to fit us and our company. "
Penny added that his company also chose a Workday human resources solution for the same reasons.
"We also went from an internal human resources solution to using Workday, if you are establishing an area that has already been promoted by a commercial package, there is no point in reinventing the wheel, there is no competitive advantage to execute HR differently from others, so we've implemented the standard package, but it's flexible and we can incorporate the Hiscox process into it. "
He said the goal of commercial SaaS solutions should be to keep them simple and not to customize them to a large extent.
"There is a great tendency to want to customize solutions, but that generates a lot of technical debt, sometimes you end up creating systems that you can not undo, but the beauty of some SaaS solutions is that you can not customize them in the same way you would. a solution in the facilities, so it gets a perennial platform.
"That means you do not get into that place 'stop the world we need to improve', and it gives you more money, it also gives our colleagues modern tools so they can move forward and do their job, and that's ultimately what that you are here for.
