Iona Technologies has signed a deal valued at three million Swiss francs (€1.9 million) with Zurich Versicherungen, the Swiss business unit of the Zurich financial services group, to support the integration of a customer contact platform.

Using Iona's products, applications will be built to integrate a Siebel call centre application and a new Business-2Business application for brokers and corporate customers.

Mr Ulrich Gahler, chief IT architect at Zurich Insurance Switzerland, said Iona's products would allow the company to provide access to its legacy systems from the company's customer relationship platform and Web-based applications.