The service-oriented architecture (SOA) is expected to enable faster product introductions and to enhance customer service. Progress Software said that it provides the connectivity and data interoperability using the Progress Sonic Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and the Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator (SI).

Progress Software also said that the Sonic ESB provides event-driven messaging between multi-vendor ESBs and back-office systems. The DataXtend SI eliminates data discrepancies for policy administration by providing an ACORD-based, single view of policy data that Kemper uses to build a policy administration system.

By creating an SOA-based IT infrastructure, Kemper eliminates labor-intensive batch processing across legacy systems, thus improving its speed of doing business and enabling Kemper to reach a time-to-market with new products and services, according to Progress Software.

Dan Benton, chief application architect of Kemper, said: The Sonic ESB and DataXtend SI enable us to provide an accurate, consistent view of information to independent agents from our siloed mainframe applications. This, in turn, greatly improves our customer satisfaction levels. The products we deployed from Progress Software have proved more valuable than we initially expected. Both products addressed our initial back-end technology needs and have continued to provide ongoing benefits that truly unite IT with our business goals."

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