Mike Parker-, a senior IT director at a national insurance company has a dilemma. He faces increasing pressure to innovate, reduce operating cost, and deliver more value to the customers. However, hard-wired and brittle connections across application silos built over the past forty years makes it very difficult, expensive and time consuming to implement and modify business processes.

Mike is not alone. This problem is particularly acute in information intensive industries such as insurance and healthcare that spend billions of dollars each year to improve business agility and extend business processes to partners such as agents, hospitals, and pharmacies. Fortunately, that barrier to business agility and innovation is now coming down as a new generation of IT called Service Oriented Architecture becomes available.

Austin, Texas based Webify Solutions recognized the power and potential of Service Oriented technology early on and has quickly gained significant customer and partner traction. The three-year old, 104-person software company is targeting insurance and healthcare as its initial markets. With offices in the U.S., Europe and a development center in India, Webify is expanding to meet customer demand for its products and services.

“We help businesses incrementally extend the life of their legacy investments while delivering compelling, game changing capabilities,” says Manoj Saxena, CEO and Chairman of Webify. ‘Webifying the processes’ as Saxena calls it, allows companies to incrementally publish their business processes that customers and business partners can self-provision into their own business processes with a few clicks of a mouse. Companies can then build on each other’s services, creating new loosely coupled, “on-demand” applications and industry-transforming business models, says Saxena.

With Webify, insurance companies can publish on demand business services to eliminate phone and e-mail based communications with their agents. This allows the agents to quickly access all required information to process a query through a browser, or by directly connecting their local machine to the insurance company’s backend systems. The ability to publish and subscribe to business processes dramatically speeds up business collaboration and reduces operating costs for both the insurance company and business partners.

Gartner calls these loosely coupled, services oriented applications as Service Oriented Business Applications. SOBA helps both IT and business executives meet the dual challenge of improving business agility while avoiding expensive rips and replace of hundreds of applications built over the past forty years.

Gartner highlights SOBA as the premier topology for composite and multi-channel applications, which will simplify the integration challenge faced by current enterprise architectures. Gartner has also identified Webify as a “transformative technology” vendor. According to Gartner, transformational technologies are those with the potential to radically change markets.
“It is a new way of binding processes, it puts more power and control in the business,” says Jason Bloomberg, Senior Analyst at the IT advisory firm Zapthink.

WEAVING A BUSINESS FABRIC
The Webify SOBA Fabric enables insurance carriers to deploy and manage an open and extensible “fabric” of business services across the business ecosystem. The SOBA Fabric allows companies to source and assemble services from a variety of sources including their own legacy systems, packaged applications such as Siebel CRM, and even outsourced BPO services such as call centers.

This ability to dynamically assemble business processes from existing and best of breed applications is attractive to executives who have invested heavily in various technology platforms. Which are difficult to connect together and, once connected, are even more challenging to modify. Using loose coupling techniques provided by the SOBA and the underlying SOBA Fabric, they now have an opportunity to compose new processes across existing resources, generate more business value from the investments they have already made.

With good customer traction, Webify in 2004 expanded customer base to blue chip insurance carriers such as Anthem, Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company and Prudential Insurance.

Having recognized the trend well ahead of its peak Webify stands ahead with little competition in the emerging service oriented insurance and healthcare software market. The closest competition comes from European contenders such as France based Prima Solutions and Holland based Cordys, a Jan Baan company.

Known to identify and build on an emerging market Saxena will steer Webify into the future. Saxena built and sold his previous company, Exterprise, in 2001 to Commerce One for approximately $100 million.

“We believe that virtualized, on demand services will transform the enterprise software market. Over the past decade, Webify Solutions’ management team has successfully capitalized on emerging Internet and enterprise software technologies. They are well positioned to do it again,” says Nathaniel Palmer, Vice president and Chief analyst, The Delphi Group.

A STRONG PATENT PORTFOLIO
But what really makes Webify unique is its patent rich core engine called PRISM semantic mediation engine. “The PRISM engine is the heart of our SOBA Fabric. The PRISM engine provides the intelligence for dynamic discovery and binding of local and remote applications exposed as services rather than creating tightly coupled point-to-point connections across hundreds of applications.

It mobilizes distributed resources to collaborate on demand,” says Saxena. With 14 patents and more in the offing, Webify has developed the equivalent of a distributed business process switching fabric that can span business, technology, and geographic boundaries.

The patents lie in the core areas of dynamic service behavior personalization and service portfolio management. Like a true telecom veteran, Saxena looks at the business transition problem in a telecom perspective. “Why can’t I on demand, discover and connect to business processes and applications using the same mechanism as my cell phone?” he asks.

Webify’s on demand solutions are delivering dramatic results for leading insurance companies around the world by helping them transform processes ranging from patient eligibility verification to claims administration, disease management, and insurance payments management.

Webify has not only attracted $18 million in venture funding from top-tier investors such as Trident Capital and Bear Stearns but has also roped in IBM as a major partner in deploying its solutions worldwide. “IBM and Webify share a common vision of business process transformation through service oriented architectures. We have successfully partnered and won over hundred million dollars in business over the last 12 months alone and are poised to do much more in the coming years” says Saxena.

A LARGE MARKET
Based on their joint success, IBM Global Services is establishing an insurance solution delivery practice around Webify products. In addition, Webify is expanding its market presence and delivery capability in Healthcare through an alliance with Bearing Point.

While Webify is currently focused on insurance and healthcare, Saxena does not rule out the possibility for expanding into other specialties in the next few years. For the near term however, Saxena is focusing on building deep, domain specific SOA solutions in these two very large domains. “We have barely scratched the surface in these markets” he adds, “These two markets are information intensive, heavily fragmented and inefficient, and under tremendous regulatory and business pressure to improve business agility and performance.”

Within the focus market, Saxena typifies his customers to fall under three categories. “One who uses our product as an service assembly and governance environment on their own, two who uses as an enabler for co-sourcing opportunity, where they want to build some, bring some system integrators, three who wants to outsource their entire process transformation efforts to IBM or Accenture,” he explains.

With a clear set of target and customers in mind Saxena follows a three point agenda to market Webify products. “We will stand up a live solution in your environment within 90 days; Don’t pay me if it doesn’t work and, if it does work, provide me three CIO introductions! ” he quips.

But in a more serious tone he adds, “We are committed to building credibility by transforming one business process, and one customer at a time.” With a promise of incremental value to the customer within the first 90 days, Saxena wins over trust and also a chance to put his products and technology to test.

Webify is expanding to meet customer demand for its products and services. The company is also on a hiring mode in the U.S. and India to boost its customer service and engineering teams. “The company is the sum total of its walking assets” says Saxena. “We have a great team and part of the magic in hiring and retaining our people is building an open culture, recognition and empowering your chain of command. People like to know that they can make a difference here,” he adds.

LOOKING AHEAD
Service oriented business applications are composed of discrete components sourced from heritage, packaged and remote application service providers. This type of composite software will give rise to a new global software supply chain according to Saxena.
This SOBA supply chain as Saxena calls it, will be aimed at sourcing and assembling software components to form new business processes just like Dell sources and assembles hardware components for its PCs.

This trend will evolve and mature over the next decade and will provide new and exciting business models and partnering opportunities for India based companies who can combine a technical platform like the SOBA Fabric with deep expertise around complex business processes, he adds.