Small Insurance Companies Get On-Demand BI Service

Published: June 10, 2008

by Alex Woodie

A trio of IT vendors, including IBM, insurance software provider Sapiens Americas, and Millbrook, an IT consultancy to the insurance industry, have teamed up to deliver an on-demand business intelligence (BI) offering for small and mid size insurance companies. The offering, called Sapiens INSIGHT for Business Intelligence, will be based on IBM's Cognos BI software, and provide smaller outfits an array of BI capabilities normally available only to larger companies.

For small and mid size property and casualty (P&C) insurance companies, the capability to analyze data effectively and efficiently can make the difference between surviving in today's competitive environment, and succumbing to market forces. However, smaller P&C providers typically can't afford the multi-million-dollar price tags that sophisticated BI implementations carry.

IBM, Sapiens, and Millbrook are looking to address that functionality gap with Sapiens INSIGHT for Business Intelligence, a new hosted BI offering that aims to deliver enterprise-class BI capabilities at a SMB price, and within SMB implementation timeframes.

The new offering will be hosted by IBM in its data centers, and based on the Cognos 8 BI platform. It will utilize Millbrook's proven data model for P&C insurers, and provide a standard data import interface for Sapiens INSIGHT policy and risk management solution, which runs on i OS (formerly i5/OS) servers, as well as other platforms.

Once up and running, Sapiens INSIGHT for BI will enable SMB P&C carriers to analyze their data using the Cognos software, and access information via Web-based dashboards, key performance indicators (KPIs), predictive analytics, alerts, and a library of standard and ad-hoc reports.

"We are excited about the offering and our ability to make it available on-demand, at an affordable cost, to carriers of all sizes," says Roni Al-Dor, CEO and president of Sapiens International, the parent company of Sapiens Americas. "Small and medium sized insurance carriers face the same challenges as larger companies, but have limited IT resources to solve such challenges. They need to compete and Sapiens INSIGHT for Business Intelligence gives them that edge."

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