Under the five-year contract Fujitsu will host Royal London’s VME (Virtual Machine Environment) operating system and deliver the operations, support functions, processing, applications and development for one of Royal London’s long-term ‘closed’ book of insurance policies.

Royal London continues to invest in new technology to drive the business forward. The VME operating system represents legacy infrastructure which needs to remain in place for the duration of the policy book. Royal London required a low risk, cost effective solution, whilst ensuring long term support for applications needed for many years. Fujitsu’s expertise in this area will ensure Royal London of a secure and reliable long term service allowing the organisation to continue to focus on IT modernisation.

“The customer experience is our primary focus. On this application, we have an estimated 1.5million policies to service. Our main concern was ensuring that customers are not adversely affected, either during the transition of the hosting of the mainframe, or through the continued support. We want a very stable service that works like clockwork and Fujitsu delivers that,” explained Andy McGarrie, Chief Technology Officer at Royal London. “By handing over the support of this IT platform to Fujitsu, we can also ensure that we focus on driving technological innovation within the business - allowing us to truly adopt a ‘hybrid’ approach, maintaining legacy where needed and driving innovation where possible.”

During the initial five-year contract which includes improved disaster recovery services, Fujitsu will enable Royal London to maintain its high level of customer service and seek to make the applications more agile and efficient.

“For many organisations there remains a practical requirement to ensure they maintain legacy mainframes - even as the wider business adopts new, innovative platform solutions,” said Anne MacRae, Head of Financial Services, UK & Ireland. “That’s why VME remains an integral part of the technological infrastructure that we call Hybrid IT. At Fujitsu, we continue to have confidence in VME as a platform and we will continue to develop it to provide solutions and services that meet the needs of our clients. As we work with Royal London our objective is to perform our role in maintaining these applications such that the new support is virtually ‘invisible’ to the business and gives its customers the high level of services that they have come to expect.”