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Modern, Multi-tiered Architecture

SurePower Innovation is a third-generation product, with the latest version completely rebuilt from the base up using modern tools and approaches.

These choices deliver large business benefits. They give SurePower Innovation its accelerated speed-to-market capabilities for product development, extension, and changes. They do this, in part, by separating the business logic and processes into a configuration layer and enabling the reuse of business services from different products and workflows to quickly create a new offering.

ISCS's goal in making the technology choices that created SurePower Innovation was to produce a system that could adapt to an ever-changing business environment. We also developed the system for its business capabilities. Our implementation of SOA, for example, began with understanding insurance business processes to create the business services at the heart of our SOA.

ISCS's philosophy is to have an open architecture that is standards-based. In combination with that, SOA has the promise to deliver seamless plug and play functionality among different vendors. The reality is that SOA, while a "must-have" technology, is no silver bullet.

Each vendor's product requires some level of integration, compounded when multiple vendors are on very different upgrade schedules. Integration is never a "once and done" task. SurePower Innovation plays very well with others, but we recommend taking advantage of SurePower Innovation's functional breadth as much as possible for a truly seamless business operation, common data model, and lower integration costs—not to mention your time and bottlenecks to getting projects done that cross department lines.

SurePower Innovation is fully Web-based. Web services also have the promise of being fully plug and play, but the reality in the field is that one vendor's standard interface isn't standard for another, and Web services are themselves evolving rapidly. SurePower Innovation can ease these issues by, for example, handling a Web service in the same way, whether it is used in an agent portal, consumer portal, third-party portal, or within the company. Our ability to make upgrades to our technology layers without affecting your configuration provides great benefit as the "details" of interfaces change.

Services Oriented Architecture (SOA)

A Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) partitions application models into self-contained business services based on standards. Each service runs as an independent business unit with no dependencies on information storage or other business services. SOA enables the reuse of business services throughout SurePower Innovation.

ISCS has been evangelizing SOA since the early 2000's, and SOA is now discussed in the insurance industry more as a compelling reason to retire a legacy system than as a criterion for evaluating new systems. Every vendor is SOA now. However, there are different degrees to which vendors follow an SOA approach and in how many components it has been applied. We would be glad to show you how thoroughly we have used SOA throughout the full breadth of the insurance enterprise-level functionality that SurePower Innovation offers.

Our uses of SOA and a modular structure also mean we do not limit you to implementing our full enterprise offering. By using XML and open industry standards, SurePower Innovation's modules can easily interface to other vendors' products and services. SOA provides for ease of maintenance and flexible use of other vendor products or for safely leveraging a legacy technology that still provides value by putting an SOA "wrapper" around it.

Model View Controller Architecture (MVC)

A Model-View-Controller Architecture (MVC) prescribes centralized control and command of all application features and presentation. By design, all business modules and their logic are stored centrally but separately from the devices used to access them. In other words, MVC allows SurePower Innovation users to access critical business functionality from almost anywhere using browser-based HTML forms, Adobe PDF forms, and wireless devices such as cell phones, PDAs or the new tablet devices. MVC's central control of security features prevents unauthorized access to sensitive data. 

Model Driven Architecture (MDA)

A Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) uses meta-language techniques, or models, to describe business problems along with their proposed solutions. Business models typically consist of a graphical view of data, requirements and system interactions. The SurePower Innovation Framework reads business models directly and dynamically creates business systems based on the model. Changing the business requires changing the model graphically. SurePower Innovation can even evaluate changes and adapt automatically to new requirements. Since no knowledge of the underlying system's technology is necessary to develop and change business models, MDA is a one way SurePower Innovation maintains extensibility in the face of rapid business change.