CHUBB INSURANCE, WARREN, NJ

Using  Topper  to manage availability during migration to Lotus Notes

The Chubb Group of Insurance Companies was established as a partnership in 1882.

The Chubb Corporation, the firm’s holding company, was formed in 1967 and trades on the NYSE as CB. Chubb ranks among the five largest publicly traded insurance organizations in the United States. Some 9500 employees throughout North America, Europe, South America, and Asia serve Chubb’s property & casualty customers from more than 115 offices in 32 countries. Chubb also works closely with 5000 independent agents and brokers worldwide.

The company has run its email systems on an IMS, mainframe-based internally developed system. As part of its development plans, Chubb has chosen the Lotus Notes product for its future strategic messaging direction.

In planning the migration from mainframe to Notes, Chubb recognized the importance of monitoring the connectivity between the two environments. "Email plays such an important part of our day to day communications, it was critical for us to ensure we were alerted should any of the components fail before users realized mail was not being delivered" explains Ellen Carney, Chubb’s Electronic Commerce Project Manager.

Chubb chose the Topper email monitoring solution from ReSoft International to monitor these connections. Topper has been implemented to test between the Notes servers as well as through to the mainframe. This incorporates testing to an ISOCOR message switch as well as to the mainframe IMS mail system.

Topper automatically sends out test messages on a frequency determined by Chubb. Should a test not return within the expected timeframe, Topper has been configured to send email and paging alerts when any component slows down. Ellen Carney adds "Topper has automated the monitoring process allowing us to spend our time on migrating users rather than continually checking the infrastructure".