Teachers Assurance is the Bournemouth, England based financial organisation specialising in providing financial products to education professionals. Teachers had invested £8m in developing a sophisticated Life & Pensions application in LINC. This ran on an A12 platform which was due to become obsolete in 1999. The IT strategy adopted by Teachers from the mid-1990s was to move to a common NT-based architecture, and by 1998 only the core Life & Pensions application was still running on a mainframe. When the converted system was implemented on Tulip PC Servers Teachers realised immediate savings in cost of hardware, software and maintenance over continuing with a mainframe strategy. But the main benefit was in interoperability and integration of the system with others based on similar technology.