The Hartford is an early adopter of Web Services and Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs), in an industry that is leading the economy in the adoption of these technologies. Their insurance-industry focused initiative known as SEMCI supports requests for quotations for insurance to multiple carriers and gets a response in a standard ACORD format. The Hartford required the ability to roll out continuously changing versions of the Services they offered as a part of SEMCI. Further complicating this integration challenge was the fact that the responding carriers used different and constantly changing versions of the insurance industry standard ACORD messages.
To solve this many-to-many versioning problem, The Hartford turned to a UDDI registry to provide a metadata repository to enable integration in a continuously changing environment. The system works by leveraging a Web Services management platform to query the UDDI registry for an appropriate Service version at runtime, thus enabling the loose coupling between Service consumers and the applications they access.
As a result, The Hartford is now able to leverage their SOA to provide greater business agility to their users, and build a "future-proof" enterprise architecture to enable continual change.
