Employee Benefits
AG EB ONLINE
Published on 22/06/2022
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Replatforming... AG’s flagship initiative for 2022!
The replatforming project isn’t just a flagship initiative. It’s quite simply the biggest IT transformation AG has undertaken in recent years. We asked Philippe Van Belle, our Chief Information & Technology Officer at AG, and Benoit Halbart, Managing Director of AG Employee Benefits & Health Care, to tell us more about this world premiere initiative in an exclusive interview.
The replatforming project isn’t just a flagship initiative. It’s quite simply the biggest IT transformation AG has undertaken in recent years. We asked Philippe Van Belle, our Chief Information & Technology Officer at AG, and Benoit Halbart, Managing Director of AG Employee Benefits & Health Care, to tell us more about this world premiere initiative in an exclusive interview.
Hello gentlemen, let's start with you, Philippe Van Belle. First of all, can you explain what “replatforming" means?
It means transferring our IT infrastructure to a new platform. In total, no less than 80 million lines of code were migrated. A massive challenge that we readily embraced.
It sounds like an ambitious and technically demanding project. Can you tell us more about the benefits of this switch?
Moving everything to a new environment is a mammoth task. But there's a solid rationale behind the move. Mainframes have been around since the 1960s. They're stable, powerful computers. But they're closed systems, which makes it hard to integrate new technologies. That's why we decided to migrate to Windows – to open the door to a more agile future by taking advantage of the new development tools available to us since making the switch. To put it another way, this project is about laying the groundwork for the future.
What's more, because switching to the new future-proof platform means faster, more reliable data transfers between our enterprise and data analytics systems, the project will deliver tangible benefits for our employees – and, of course, for our customers. Making sure our systems are robust and ready to face the future is an absolute priority.
Over the course of your career, have you ever experienced a project of this size and scale?
Never in 35 years. The target architecture is really a "first". We have put down new foundations for a new technological future for AG and its customers. By uniting our enterprise and data analytics systems, we've successfully created a data backbone, which is obviously a tremendous asset for AG.
Benoit Halbart, AG is the big winner of this migration. But what about your customers, do they also stand to gain?
Absolutely. Flexibility and innovation are firmly embedded in our DNA. By making our systems more open, we'll be better able to keep pace with digital developments and roll out new technologies that cater to our customers' evolving needs in the coming years. And, of course, it's good news for our partners, who are in daily contact with our customers.
Should your customers expect to see a lot of changes?
We've just switched to a brand-new technology platform, but users won't see any immediate changes in terms of our applications and front-end systems. This project is all about making our infrastructure more agile and responsive as new technologies emerge.
In closing, I'd like to add that AG was already at the cutting edge in terms of IT, but with this migration, we've made the structural changes we need to future-proof our applications and websites. This is essential for the stability of our service.
