Update: Information Builders to Offer Vertical Solution for Insurance Industry

LAS VEGAS, May 17 /PRNewswire/ -- Information Builders Summit 2005 - Information Builders, the enterprise business intelligence (BI) standard of choice for organizations around the world, today announced that BearingPoint, Inc. , one of the world's largest business consulting and systems integration firms, will help Information Builders bring a packaged business intelligence solution to the insurance market. This solution is the first in a series of packaged applications that Information Builders plans to introduce this year.

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The solution leverages Information Builders' 30 years of customer-driven technology innovation in enterprise business intelligence and integration, with the experience of BearingPoint's insurance practice, and can provide property and casualty insurers with a view of their complex business environment across multiple levels of the organization.

WebFOCUS Reporting Solution Brings Powerful Advantages to Insurers

The new Information Builders Insurance Reporting Foundation (IRF) can help increase insurance profits in today's volatile economic environment. Designed with and tested by insurance clients in production application settings, the offering consists of a sophisticated insurance data model, a robust ETL module for efficient scheduled updating of the IRF database, and a suite of parameterized reporting frameworks that are designed to save time and money while facilitating improved service and overall business performance. The whole application is provided in a user-tested dashboard GUI along with Insurance KPIs to provide effective user access to product functions with minimal training.

"We believe that our decision to use the IRF data model enables us to accelerate our data warehouse deployment," said Moien Zobairi, the director of Data Warehouse Development at ING Canada. "Our decision was influenced by the data model strength, flexibility, and ease of adaptation to our business intelligence needs."

Because the application is built on the core technology within WebFOCUS, it is able to scale to support the ever-increasing informational needs of insurers, providing real value for risk management, policy rate management, underwriting profitability, claims management, regulatory compliance and governance, customer service, and distributor management.

Some of the key capabilities that IRF brings to insurers include the ability to:

-- Provide underwriting and exposure managers complete and consistent risk and exposure reports in a fraction of the time they normally take to get it -- Provide executives consistent tabular and graphical analysis along with insurance KPIs to manage fiscal integrity, reserves, profitability, rate structures, and marketing effectiveness -- Provide actuaries parameterized triangulation reports instantly to set policy rates instead of the days and weeks it now takes them to get the analysis -- Consolidate "islands of insurance data" into consistent, actionable information -- Correlate data across claims and policy administration -- Provide a consistent data warehouse for reporting from data in multiple systems -- Present a single version of the truth for state audits -- Ensure security parameters are supported through the reports all the way to the data attribute

BearingPoint and Information Builders Bring Solution to Property and Casualty Industry

BearingPoint has experience with wide-ranging system integration efforts in the insurance industry and has teamed with Information Builders to bring the Information Builders packaged reporting solution for the property and casualty industry to market. By marrying BearingPoint's methodology in the insurance market with the open, extensible enterprise reporting environment of WebFOCUS, insurers can expect a solution designed to achieve speedy, seamless integration into their business practices.

Insurance knowledgeable consultants install the IRF, set up the IT security standards, and integrate the solution into existing informational assets. Compared with developing and building reports from the ground up, the total cost of ownership is two to four times less and the package saves up to two years in implementation time.

Insurance Customers First to Benefit From New Packaged Applications

The top 10 insurance companies worldwide already use Information Builders technology, and as these companies continue to face issues with underwriting profit, premium growth, improving customer service, and assimilating mergers and acquisitions, Information Builders' business intelligence and integration solutions provide critical insight to help optimize business operations by cutting costs while helping to retain and expand the sales and customer base.

The inherent functionality of WebFOCUS to seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructures, as well as scale to an increasing user base -- upward of millions -- also provides insurance companies with the capabilities that are essential to keep pace with rapidly changing regulatory and competitive market demands.

"Information Builders didn't just sell us technology or tools," said Foster Francis, supervisor of Administrative Systems for Wawanesa, one of the largest property and casualty insurers in Canada. "They offered us a complete solution to a set of problems. The Insurance Reporting Framework includes a data model, prepackaged reports, ETL software, and all the necessary services to install, configure, and tailor the environment to our needs."

"The world's top 10 insurance companies as listed by The Financial Times' Global 500 all use our technology," says Gerald Cohen, CEO of Information Builders. "The fact that the leaders in this industry choose us to help them solve real business problems proves that we have a unique understanding of this market. With the Insurance Reporting Framework, we are packaging all our expertise into one easy-to-implement solution."

About BearingPoint, Inc.

BearingPoint, Inc. is one of the world's largest business consulting, systems integration, and managed services firms serving government agencies, Global 2000 companies, medium-sized businesses, and other organizations. We provide business and technology strategy, systems design, architecture, applications implementation, network infrastructure, systems integration, and managed services. Our service offerings are designed to help our clients generate revenue, reduce costs, and access the information necessary to operate their business on a timely basis. Based in McLean, Va., BearingPoint has been named by Fortune as one of America's Most Admired Companies in the computer and data services sector. For more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.bearingpoint.com/.

About Information Builders

Information Builders, a $300 million company, is the leader in enterprise business intelligence and real-time Web reporting. The company's WebFOCUS product -- the industry's most scalable, secure, and flexible -- is able to meet all the reporting needs of the extended enterprise, ranging from analysts to power users to the widest deployments for hundreds of thousands of users. Additionally, WebFOCUS' empowerment of organizations seeking to leverage all their data by accessing it all -- from legacy to data warehouse -- is unmatched.

Information Builders' award-winning technology has successfully provided quality software and superior services for 30 years to more than 12,000 customers, including most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,750 people, and has over 350 business partners. For more information, visit the company's Web site at http://www.informationbuilders.com/.