BUPA bets £5m on .NET web services

The membership business of BUPA is paying systems integrator Edenbrook £5m over two years to overhaul its systems using web services technology.

The health insurer is using Microsoft .NET Windows Forms to create a smart client that will be consistent across all its customer-facing web systems.

Web services typically falls into one of two camps - either Microsoft, with its .NET framework, or Java platforms such as J2EE - and is all about reusing software components to build different services, normally using the internet to tie all the code together.

Edenbrook will work with BUPA staff in a programme team of more than 120. There will be three phases running to the end of 2007 to work on finance, web, legacy and data warehouse systems.

BUPA CIO John Lister in a statement mentioned the system integrator's "modern approach to development" and the company's technical and business understanding as reasons why it won the contract.

Edenbrook has already been working for a year on BUPA UK's SME customers. The wider deal comes after BUPA International has moved away from a mainframe environment and embraced a service oriented architecture based on Microsoft's .NET and an Oracle database.