Microsoft SQL Server
Customer Solution Case Study
Overview
Country or Region: United States
Industry: Financial Services,
Insurance
Customer Profile
With roughly 3,000 employees and
more than half of the 100 largest
U.S. companies as clients, Pacific
Life Insurance Company is a leading
provider of insurance products,
annuities, and mutual funds.
Business Situation
The Life Division’s reliance on IT
personnel to access data and create
reports had become time-
consuming and inefficient. It
needed a standard data
environment with easy-to-use
reporting capabilities.
Solution
The company deployed Microsoft®
SQL Server™ 2005 Enterprise
Edition with Business Intelligence
features, including SQL Server 2005
Integration Services and SQL Server
2005 Reporting Services.
Benefits
 Data integration and
standardization
 Easy data access and reporting
 Improved business and IT
Insurance Leader Enables Business
Users, Frees IT Staff with Data-
“Enabling our business users to access our
data warehouse directly through dynamic
reports and queries has been a true
testament to the power, functionality, and
accessibility of SQL Server 2005.”
Cameron Cosgrove, Vice President of Information Technology, Pacific Life Insurance
The Life Division of Pacific Life Insurance Company had
a strong dependency between its business and
information technology (IT) workers. The executives,
business analysts, finance personnel, and customer
service representatives who rely on corporate data to do
their jobs had to frequently employ IT specialists to help
access the desired data and put it into meaningful
reports. The process was slow for business users and
exceptionally time-consuming for the IT staff. To enable
its business groups to be more self-sufficient and free its
IT personnel from constantly creating business reports,
Pacific Life deployed Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2005
Enterprise Edition with Business Intelligence features.
The new solution has helped the company’s Life Division
standardize its data infrastructure, ease data access and
business reporting, improve business and IT efficiency,
and reduce costs.
“SQL Server 2005 Situation
Founded in 1868 and claiming more
has enabled us to than half of the 100 largest United
build a solid, States companies as clients, Pacific
Life Insurance Company is a long-
uniform foundation standing insurance industry leader.
for data Over the years, however, a costly
dependency had developed between
management, its business personnel and IT
reporting, and specialists. The more than 800 execu-
tives, business analysts, finance
analysis.” workers, and customer service
Cameron Cosgrove, Vice President of representatives of the company’s Life
Information Technology, Pacific Life Division were largely reliant on the IT
Insurance Company staff to access corporate data to
produce business-critical, ad hoc
reports. Accordingly, the IT staff was
constantly burdened with requests
from the business groups, taking
them away from key infrastructure
enhancement projects.
“It was a problematic and
unproductive circumstance,” recalls
Cameron Cosgrove, Vice President of
Information Technology at Pacific Life.
“Our business groups could not
gather client and policy data or
generate meaningful reports on their
own, and were forced to wait for IT
specialists to do it for them. Of
course, these frequent requests took
the IT groups away from their day-to-
day tasks. Each side was encumbered
by the other.”
In delivering life insurance products
and services to large premium
accounts, the company’s Life Division
was supporting more than a quarter-
terabyte of data spread across a
mainframe, two clusters of database
servers, and multiple locations. Five
of the organization’s 70 databases
were reserved for reporting, housing
data related to policies, agents,
finances, transactions, and new
business opportunities. Yet these
reporting databases contained
complex data schema with more than
20 tables and multiple data fields
each. Consequently, important
business information was difficult to
access, compile, and analyze.
To further complicate matters,
various business users needed to
obtain the data for differing reasons
and from assorted locations. The Life
Division’s regional offices across the
United States require data access and
report generation to help them
support the organization’s
independent agents. These regional
offices are responsible for processing
sales proposals, delivering presales
information, and submitting insurance
applications for underwriting. The
division’s home office requires data
and reports that outline business
performance and facilitate under-
writing, claim processing, account
inquiries, and regional office support.
These disparate offices need a variety
of reports on a daily, weekly, monthly,
and yearly basis. Data related to the
number and type of policies, the
company catalog, account demo-
graphics, specific business inquiries,
company performance, and quarterly
accounting is pulled, compiled, and
examined regularly. More often than
not, these reports were custom-built
directly on the mainframe—a complex
and time-consuming undertaking for
“SQL Server 2005
has freed us from
the shackles of
mainframe reports.”
Christian Berke, Data Services
Manager, Pacific Life Insurance
Company
the company’s IT staff. Even when
reports were prepackaged and
embedded in the organization’s
internal applications, Cosgrove
indicates that IT specialists had to
help business users understand and
utilize them.
“Reports are critical to our business,
and we have the data necessary to
produce those reports,” he says.
“However, our data systems are so
dense and our reporting requirements
so varied, we needed a robust,
standardized, easy-to-use solution
that would enable our various
business factions to be more self-
sufficient and free our IT groups to
focus on infrastructure improvement
projects.”
Solution
Cosgrove and his IT staff decided to
standardize the Life Division data
warehouse using Microsoft® SQL
Server™ 2005 Enterprise Edition. The
organization deployed SQL Server
2005 Business Intelligence features,
particularly SQL Server 2005
Integration Services and SQL Server
2005 Reporting Services, to connect
its disparate data sources, improve
information access, and enable
dynamic report generation.
“SQL Server 2005 Integration Services
and Reporting Services deliver an
advanced and easy-to-use solution for
linking all of our data and giving our
business users the ability to generate
reports without the assistance of
IT specialists,” explains Christian
Berke, Data Services Manager at
Pacific Life. “The solution helps our
various constituents—regardless of
technical expertise—access and
compile data from multiple sources
and gives us an unified view of our
information assets.”
With exceptional integration
capabilities and extraction,
transformation, and loading (ETL)
functionality, SQL Server Integration
Services enables the Life Division of
Pacific Life to more easily manage,
access, and analyze information from
its array of data sources. The
Integration Services data-integration
pipeline architecture allows SQL
Server 2005 to consume data from
multiple sources simultaneously,
perform multiple complex
transformations, and then
concurrently distribute the data to
multiple destinations. Therefore, the
organization’s data warehouse can be
used not only for large data sets, but
also for complex data flows. As the
information flows from source to
destination, the stream of data can be
split, merged, combined, and
otherwise manipulated with other
data streams.
“SQL Server Integration Services has
become the glue that fuses our
mainframe, databases, and
applications,” Berke notes. “It gives
us the ability to link, compile, and
manipulate our data in a number of
ways from any of our data sources. As
a result, business users with diverse
requirements can easily access and
analyze information that is essential
to their jobs without knowing where it
“Reports that used resides, how it links to other related
data, or how to pull it out of a service-
to take our IT staff oriented architecture system.”
three days to
With tight integration of multiple data
generate are now sources and linkages between
created by business previously uncorrelated data, Pacific
Life has been able to take full
personnel in three advantage of SQL Server Reporting
seconds. SQL Server Services. Using a data flow from
Integration Services as a data source,
2005 does Reporting Services offers a
everything we need comprehensive enterprise reporting
solution that enables the creation and
in one, easy-to-use management of both traditional,
package.” paper-oriented reports and
interactive, Web-based reports. It
Cameron Cosgrove, Vice President of delivers a sophisticated yet easy-to-
Information Technology, Pacific Life use environment for authoring,
administering, and delivering reports,
which helps Pacific Life business users
interact with data in an ad hoc
fashion and generate their own
reports from scratch.
“Due to the complexity of our data
infrastructure, our business users
could barely access data in the past,
let alone generate functional reports,”
says Berke. “Today, those same
business users are able to quickly
extract the desired information and
create business reports in a variety of
formats, from a number of sources
and for a range of applications.”
Berke indicates that Report Builder, a
new feature of Reporting Services,
has been a key component in
enabling nontechnical users to
generate their own reports. An ad hoc
reporting tool, Report Builder
incorporates a user-friendly business
query model that allows Pacific Life
personnel to quickly create robust
reports. Because Report Builder offers
usability similar to familiar software
such as the Microsoft Office Excel®
spreadsheet software and the
Microsoft Office PowerPoint®
presentation graphics program, it is
easy to utilize and does not require a
deep technical understanding of the
underlying data sources.
In addition to SQL Server Integration
Services and Reporting Services, the
Life Division is planning to make use
of SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services
in the near future. Analysis Services
offers high-scale online analytical
processing and data-mining
algorithms for in-depth data and
business analysis. Berke expects that
Analysis Services will help the Pacific
Life IT staff build complex analytical
models that facilitate enhancements
to business operations.
Benefits
According to Cosgrove, SQL Server
2005 Business Intelligence features—
such as Integration Services and
Reporting Services—have helped
Pacific Life Insurance Company
standardize its data infrastructure,
ease data access and business
reporting, improve business and IT
efficiency, and reduce costs.
Data Integration and
Standardization
SQL Server 2005 has enabled Pacific
Life to standardize its data
environment and the ways in which
users access data and generate
reports. The company was previously
using Business Objects Crystal
Reports, custom-built mainframe
reports, and other application-specific
reporting tools. Each required specific
skill sets, limiting the number of
people who could create, augment,
and utilize the tools. SQL Server 2005
offers a standardized, familiar data
and reporting environment for the Life
Division of Pacific Life, ensuring
consistency across the organization.
SQL Server Integration Services
provides seamless integration of
multiple, previously unconnected data
sources, and Reporting Services with
Report Builder delivers a consistent
set of reporting features.
“SQL Server 2005 has enabled us to
build a solid, uniform foundation for
data management, reporting, and
analysis,” says Cosgrove. “Regardless
of whether the user is part of a
business analysis, finance, client
service, or IT group, the process for
accessing and compiling data is
straightforward and standardized.”
Easy Data Access and Reporting
Because the solution offers a
consistent, standardized data
infrastructure and user-friendly
reporting capabilities, access to
company data and the creation of
business reports have been
significantly eased. Pacific Life
business personnel are now able to
extract account, policy, agent, and
transaction information and create a
variety of reports, regardless of
whether the reports are embedded in
internal applications, delivered as
scheduled or real-time analysis
mechanisms, or generated in ad hoc
fashion.
According to Berke, the organization’s
business personnel had not generated
a single report on their own prior to
the deployment of SQL Server
Integration Services and Reporting
Services. In less than two months
after deployment, however, the
business groups had successfully
generated more than 50 reports
without the assistance of IT
specialists.
“SQL Server 2005 offers an
environment and set of tools that we
all understand,” explains Berke. “We
now have an open, flexible data
infrastructure that allows different
business users to write and produce
their own reports in any way they
want at any given time, without
knowledge of code queries,
PivotTable® views, or relational
databases.”
Improved Business and IT
Efficiency
By helping all users to be more self-
sufficient in finding and utilizing
company data, and freeing IT
specialists from continually gen-
erating reports, SQL Server 2005 has
improved the overall efficiency of
both the business and IT groups.
Business analysts, executives, finance
workers, and client service
representatives no longer have to
wait for IT experts to produce reports.
In addition, the Pacific Life IT staff no
longer spends an inordinate amount
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For more information about Pacific
Life Insurance Company products
and services, call (800) 800-7646 or
visit the Web site at:
www.pacificlife.com
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Document published May 2006
of time building mainframe and
custom reports and teaching business
personnel how to use them.
Berke expects the new data
infrastructure to reduce by 80 percent
the time that the IT staff spends on
developing mainframe and custom
reports. “SQL Server 2005 has freed
us from the shackles of mainframe
reports,” he exclaims. “As a result,
our IT personnel can spend more time
on infrastructure enhancement
projects that bring additional
efficiencies to the business.”
Reduced Costs
The efficiency gains realized by the
SQL Server 2005 deployment have
reduced Pacific Life’s business and IT
costs. Business users are achieving
their data analysis objectives faster,
and fewer IT personnel are required
to create, manage, and distribute the
company’s business reports.
“In our new business department
alone, we have a set of 20 reports
that previously necessitated a full-
time IT person to administer,” says
Berke. “Those reports have been
completely handed over to the
business analysts in the department,
and we were able to reassign the IT
specialist to other projects.”
“Enabling our business users to
access our data warehouse directly
through dynamic reports and queries
has been a true testament to the
power, functionality, and accessibility
Software and Services
 Microsoft Servers
− Microsoft SQL Server 2005
of SQL Server 2005,” concludes
Cosgrove. “Reports that used to take
our IT staff three days to generate are
now created by business personnel in
three seconds. SQL Server 2005 does
everything we need in one, easy-to-
use package.”
Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 is
comprehensive, integrated data
management and analysis software
that enables organizations to reliably
manage mission-critical information
and confidently run today’s
increasingly complex business
applications. By providing high
availability, security enhancements,
and embedded reporting and data
analysis tools, SQL Server 2005 helps
companies gain greater insight from
their business information and
achieve faster results for a
competitive advantage. And, because
it’s part of Windows Server System,
SQL Server 2005 is designed to
integrate seamlessly with your other
server infrastructure investments.
For more information about SQL
Server 2005, go to:
www.microsoft.com/sqlserver
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