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White Paper
                                       SOA in Insurance
                                       Industry

Executive Summary
Today's insurance industry is growing at a rapid pace. The instant response to customers and change in
business processes is highly desired to get the competitive advantage. As a result of rapid growth
Insurance Companies have to deal with following (the list not complete):

a. Increasing number of the IT systems involved in supporting their business.
b. Increasing number of product lines.
c. Increasing number of customers and partners.
d. Increasing number of mergers and acquisitions.
e. Increasing demand to improve time to market.
f. Increasing responsiveness and flexibility.

To fulfill the business need and time to market, insurance companies are facing ever-increasing
integration challenges. Most of the insurance companies have been managing large number of
independent IT systems to serve their business. Most of these systems are self-contained & monolithic
and do not have any idea about other systems in the organization.

For decades, insurance companies have been evolving away from these self-contained & monolithic
systems towards network models. The goal of linking processes with transaction and data is one of the
most important goals of an insurer’s IT department to live with dynamics of business. Few insurance
companies have achieved a degree of success by implementing a set of EAI applications or proprietary
interfaces, but customized interfaces with external application have proven to be expensive to create
and maintain. Moreover because of tight coupling it is not easier to replace EAI applications.
“Integration” remains a major issue.

Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) proposes insurers to achieve their integration goals in an efficient
manner. SOA helps insurer to achieve elusive goal of loose coupling. SOA address the challenges faced
by business and IT managers like:

1.     Challenge to deliver new solutions rapidly with fewer resources.
2.     Challenge to integrate new solutions with legacy applications etc.

With the help of SOA, insurers can construct business application rapidly by utilizing existing services
abvilable intra or inter organization. SOA is an IT strategy that organizes the discrete functions
contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards-based services that can be
combined and reused quickly to meet business needs.

Few insurance companies have already adopted the Service Oriented Architecture approach and
getting competitive advantages over others. The Service Oriented Architecture approach implemented
correctly will reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of systems and increase the Return on
Investment (ROI) by leveraging existing IT assets and enable true components re-usability.
Page 2                                                                SOA in Insurance Industry


                                      Purpose
                                      This white paper examines the need & implementation of SOA in
 CONTENTS                             Insurance industry. This document briefly describes the following:
 1     Purpose                            •   Business and technical challenges faced by Insurance Industry
 2     Insurance Industry                 •   How SOA can help Insurance Industry to achieve its goals.
       Challenges
                                          •   Business benefits from SOA
     a. Business Challenges
     b. Technical Challenges              •   How to adopt SOA

 3
                                      Insurance Industry Challenges
       SOA in Insurance Industry
     a. Web Services
     b. Evolution of SOA in
                                      Challenges are mounting day by day for insurers. Increased pressure for
                 Insurance Industry   profitability translates into a hard look at cost reduction and top-line
                                      revenue growth. Profitability is linked to the ability to accurately assess
     c. SOA reference Model
                                      risk and manage customer relationships over time to achieve financial
     d. SOA benefits                  success.
 4     SOA Adoption                   Insurers recognize that in order to respond to these pressures, they need
                                      to improve efficiency of back-office processing functions while improving
 5     SOA Adoption in Insurance
                                      the quality of service to the distribution channel. Agents have become
       Industry
                                      more selective in choosing carriers; they are looking to align with an
 6     Conclusion                     organization that not only has a wide product portfolio, but makes it easy

                                      Business Challenges
                                      In an industry marked by fierce competition, consolidation, and
                                      globalization, insurers have to differentiate themselves at all levels,
                                      including product innovation, distribution and customer service. At the
                                      same time, they need to constantly streamline and enhance the
                                      flexibility of policy administration and improve regulatory compliance.
                                      Among the challenges insurer face is:
                                      •       Competitive pressures
                                      •       Increase complex distribution channels
                                      •       Slower policy issuance
                                      •       Streamlining claims service
 In the competitive world
insurers are finding ways             •       Regulatory compliance
   to do more with less.              Competitive Pressure
                                      In the competitive world insurers are finding ways to do more with less.
                                      The ability of insurer to survive and show cutting edge depends upon how
                                      the insurer take advantage of the opportunities of the market to satisfy
                                      the customer needs with efficient profit margins. It sometime leads to
                                      addition of new business process or modifications in existing process with
                                      minimal impact in current infrastructure.
Page 3                                                         SOA in Insurance Industry


                          Increasing complex distribution channels
                          Insurance market is as usual dominated by agent-based sales, distribution
Competitive pressures,    channels have multiplied and become complex. Insurer finds it difficult
Increase complex          to leverage its distribution channel and make it easier to work with
distribution channels,    agents and distributors. To overcome the these complexities of multiple
                          channels serving the market, insurer has to make agents and distributors
Slower policy issuance,
                          an integral part of the business and to manage distribution more
Streamlining claims
                          effectively, insurers need to become “plug and play” operations.
service and Regulatory    However, this is also difficult due to the inflexibility of their legacy
compliance are the most   systems.
important business
                          New policy issuance
challenges of any
                          The fragmented nature of the insurance value chain has been increased
Insurance company.
                          tremendously. To provide a seamless experience to the customer, it
                          requires better orchestration between different steps of the customer
                          acquisition process. Inaccurate data, incomplete data, multiple hands-
                          offs, and the re-keying of data are some of the challenges insurers face
                          when issuing new policies.
                          Streamlining claims service
                          It is well known that retaining existing customers is always more cost-
                          effective than acquiring new ones. The claims experience is pivotal to
                          customer retention. The claims strategy has three fundamental pillars:
                          claims efficiency, claims effectiveness and customer service. With the
                          legacy infrastructure, where various systems are distributed
                          heterogeneously and working in silo, it is hard for insurer to provide
                          customer claims efficiently and in time frame to a lesser extent.
                          Customer is always eager to know the status of claims from the day
                          customer files it. With the systems, which are not synchronized within
                          reasonable time frame, it is almost impossible for insurer to provide
                          accurate status of claims to the customer.
                          Regulatory Compliance
                          Enterprises have to comply with government regulations to stay in
                          business. Insurance industry across geographies is all the more
                          susceptible to regulatory compliance. Each insurance company has
                          different calculation/estimation rules for different geographies. This
                          creates the need for more modular solutions where everyday changing
                          regulatory compliance can be addressed
                          Some recent regulations in US, notably Sarbanes-Oxley, required IT
                          organizations to review and in some cases retrofit all business systems.
                          This diverted scarce IT resources and funding away from development of
                          new business capabilities. Future regulatory changes could require
                          further changes.
Page 4                                                            SOA in Insurance Industry

                            IT Challenges
                            IT infrastructure of any company is never being untouched if there is
                            change in business process. The IT of insurance organizations has to deal
Flexibility, dealing with   with large and increasing number of systems involved in supporting their
legacy applications,        business, which is result of expanded product lines, distribution channels,
addition of new systems     mergers and acquisitions. Most insurance companies find themselves
and time to market are      managing several independent IT systems of different sizes and dozens of
                            business applications spread throughout the enterprise. Some to major
the most important
                            challenges faced by IT of the insurance company are:
technical challenges of
any Insurance company.
                            Flexibility
                            Often called “agility” within the industry, is about rapidly adapting to,
                            and taking advantage of, change. For example, when a new opportunity
                            arrives (e.g., a new product offering is identified) or a business condition
                            changes (e.g., a merger), companies need technology solutions to
                            support this changing environment rapidly and without much hassle.

                            Dealing with Legacy Applications
                            According to the Celent survey of insurance carriers1, 69 percent of core
                            life and 60 percent of core property & casualty carriers retain legacy
                            systems. Numerous mergers and acquisitions mean many insurers have
                            multiple legacy systems, resulting in siloed processes, data, and
                            management. Legacy IT systems are found hard to synchronize with the
                            other application in the enterprise and with increasing number of legacy
                            systems IT house of insurer needs to find the ways of handling the legacy
                            systems.
                            Addition of New Systems
                            Addition of new IT application/systems is obvious during merger,
                            acquisitions and expansion. To provide customer seamless service, all of
                            new applications have to interact with the other application in the
                            enterprise. These systems are not readily available to integrate with
                            current IT infrastructure. Integration of these systems requires recourses
                            and time; due to pressure from business stakeholder, IT departments find
                            it is difficult to rapidly incorporate chagnes.

                            Time to market
                            It is response time in updating/upgrading the IT infrastructure to reflect
                            the changes in business. High time to market potentially is not
                            considered to be good offering by IT solution hub. In the complex
                            distributed heterogeneous environment, the challenging factor for IT
                            infrastructure is promptly align with the rapidly changing business rules &
                            processes and meditate on the changes in business process.
Page 5                                                             SOA in Insurance Industry


                             SOA in Insurance Industry
                             In any industry, be it Insurance or Manufacturing or any other, Enterprise
      Service Oriented       Architecture (EA) give the true picture of the organization’s IT systems.
      Architecture is an     How systems are related to each other, how systems are integrated with
  approach to Enterprise     each other, how much tightly coupled systems are, how business
                             processes are define? Answer to these questions drives the IT strategies
 Architecture where major
                             of the organizations, for the evolution of IT systems.
 components or software
  pieces are exposed as      Service Oriented Architecture is an approach to Enterprise Architecture
 “service”. The process of   where major components or software pieces are exposed as “service”.
      exposing existing      The process of exposing existing components and software pieces as
                             services abstracts the complexity of the individual component/software
      components and
                             piece and hence enables real loose coupling. By converting software
     software pieces as
                             elements/pieces into services, SOA enables organization to reuse existing
   services abstracts the    services and create new solutions rapidly and with less money. SOA
      complexity of the      makes EA flexible, easier to modify, easier to evolve with less number of
          individual         resources.
    component/software
 piece and hence enables     Web Services
    real loose coupling.     The SOA is an IT approach which has been around for quite a while.
                             Organization has been practicing this approach for many years to improve
                             their EA architecture. There are quite a few numbers of technologies
                             which have attempted to realize the goal of SOA, where each software
                             element/component in the organization available as a service. Web
                             Services is one of the effective ways to make a software
                             element/component as a service.
                             Webservices are tactical in nature, while SOA is a way of thinking about
                             building software components.
                             Web Services are based upon open interoperable standards, free from
                             vendor specific locks. These open interoperable standards enable to
                             make any type of software element/component available as service
                             irrespective of the hardware, operating systems, and programming
                             language. Web Service is not the only way to make an SOA, however it is
                             the most effective and matured way of achieving SOA.

                             Evolution of SOA in Insurance Industry
                             Monolithic Systems
                             In the olden days most of the insurance companies used to build
                             applications with the intention of fulfilling the requirement of specific
                             business functionality or used to target a specific department in the
                             organization. Most of these systems are self contained & monolithic and
                             do not have any idea about other systems in the organization.
                             The need of time & business and evolution in IT enables organization to
                             integrate disparate systems with the help of proprietary interfaces and
                             EAI application.
Page 6                                         SOA in Insurance Industry

         The systems communicated with each other using custom/proprietary
         interfaces, so tightly coupled. The support for those custom/proprietary
         interfaces was expensive and even sometimes not available because of
         the obsolete technologies.
         A typical traditional insurance industry’s IT architecture integrated using
         custom interfaces is depicted below:




         Distributed Systems
         With increasing demand and evolution in technologies, new specialized
         software applications like CRM, SCM etc are developed. These
         applications quickly become interdependent and requiring each other to
         complete the core business processes. The organization’s business
         processes were not only interacting with internal systems but also with
         external systems. The architecture where more than one computer
         system participates in the completion of a business process is called
         distributed architecture.
         The unavailability of flexible integration technology, high cost of custom
         integration technologies caused organizations to take advice from
         integration focused & technology companies. These integration oriented
         service/technology companies introduced EAI to facilitate integration in
         the distributed environment.
Page 7                                         SOA in Insurance Industry


         A typical insurance industry’s distributed IT architecture integrated using
         EAI components/modules is depicted below:




         Service Oriented Architecture
         Software as a “service” is making major impact on the field of Enterprise
         Architecture. Service Oriented Architecture approach is making the high
         level of interoperability between systems, improving the alignment
         between technology and business processes. Because of its open
         standards, the SOA has the potential to deliver vast improvements in IT
         cost control, business agility, and business process efficiency.
         SOA makes it a simple matter to change hardware and software, as well
         as technologies and even their locations. This makes business managers
         highly independent to pursue with their business goals with fewer
         technology constraints.
         A typical insurance industry’s distributed IT architecture integrated using
         SOA approach is depicted below:
Page 8                                                         SOA in Insurance Industry




EAI                                    SOA Based on Web Services
Based on proprietary technology        Based on open standards.
Relatively tight coupling between      Loosely coupled systems.
systems
Minimal vendor interoperability        Standard-driven vendor interoperability.
Restricted reusability of EAI broken   Highly reusable service interfaces by any SOA-enabled
interfaces                             application.
Page 9                                        SOA in Insurance Industry


         SOA Reference Architecture
         SOA Reference Architecture provides the blue-print of enterprise
         architecture based upon the building blocks of SOA. The starting point for
         building the reference architecture is services.

         An SOA is built around the concept of a business and technical service.
         Making software components/elements/units as a reusable piece of logic
         designed service to execute a piece of business process with standard
         access and invocation interfaces. So the first capability of any SOA
         reference architecture has to deal with service identification and
         creation, whether formed of old components or newly written ones.

         Once these services have been created, the power of an SOA is derived
         from joining these services together.

         Here is an example of a SOA reference architecture created by Infogain
         for one of its client (Mitchell).
Page 10                                                          SOA in Insurance Industry

                           SOA Benefits
                           SOA is not only beneficial from IT perspective but also from business
                           perspective. It is extremely important to know that SOA helps
                           organization to streamline their business process and extremely quick in
                           creating and modifying business processes and lowering IT budgets.

                           SOA can be defined as a set of design and organizational principles that
                           expose business logic and data as independent reusable services. The
                           overall objective of SOA is to structure the organization such that
                           business vision and requirements can drive IT towards the same goals
                           without technology impeding achievement of objectives.

                           Exposing IT assets as reusable services gives business managers the ability
                           to capitalize on previously unrealized integration points.

                           Business Benefits from SOA
                           Lower IT Budgets
Lower IT Budgets, High     Due to increased competition and lower margins, companies are looking
ROI on IT Projects,        for lower budgets in managing their IT systems. According to Tom
Promotes alignment of IT   Pohlmann of Forrester Research, CIOs are seeing value in cutting costs
                           and getting more out of their prior investments.
with Business, Higher
Business flexibility are
                           The SOA model has the ability to decrease IT budgets in several ways.
the primary tangible
business benefits of       a. Since the underlying applications and technology to support an SOA are
SOA.                       already in place at most large organizations, the development of service
                           components is more about integrating existing application and business
                           logic than it is about writing completely new systems.

                           b. SOA can lower IT budgets is by extending the useful life of certain
                           business applications. Many of today’s large business applications require
                           frequent upgrades and, depending on their length of service, may need
                           to be re-architected or replaced to meet new business requirements.
                           With a SOA in place, IT organizations have a new method for meeting
                           business requirements. Functionality from various applications, exposed
                           via the services layer, can be integrated to create new applications,
                           views of data, or automated processes. The continued use of IT assets,
                           therefore, also contributes to a decrease in IT budgets.

                           c. The SOA inherently changes an IT organization’s definition of
                           development projects. Today, many IT organizations are still pursuing
                           bigger implementations with tremendous amounts of capital, resources,
                           and time dedicated to projects – and with no guarantee of success. With
                           a SOA, projects are smaller in scope and are completed in less time. As a
                           result, the capital investments and resources required to complete these
                           projects are quite less.
Page 11                                                          SOA in Insurance Industry

                           Higher ROI on IT projects
                           Reduction in development timeframes and the resources dedicated to
                           these projects directly impact the costs associated with a project.
                           Reducing the costs of development projects will positively impact ROI.

                           Promotes alignment of IT with Business
                           SOA adds value to an organization due to its ability to align the IT
                           organization with the business drivers of an organization. The process of
                           abstraction that is completed as part of SOA removes application specific
                           complexities. This allows IT resources to focus on how to best use their
                           portfolio of applications and data stores to meet the business
                           requirements.

                           Higher Business flexibility
                           SOA contribution in the business flexibility is recommendable. According
                           to a recent study of Fortune 500 companies, over 80% of companies had
                           altered their business model in a given two-year period. Nearly 66% of
                           these companies stated that their business model changes had been
                           constrained by inflexible IT5.

                           The speed of change is likely to increase going forward and business
                           managers will have to continually adjust business models to meet
                           customer and competitive pressures. To be effective, these adjustments
                           will have to be implemented rapidly and without the interference of IT
                           limitations. Although a SOA will not remove all IT obstacles, a well-
                           designed SOA does give IT managers a new method for creating solutions
                           based on proven business applications.

                           IT Benefits from SOA
                           Loosely coupled architecture
                              • Increases organizational agility; allows companies to easily
 Loosely coupled                  assemble, and modify business processes in response to market
 architecture, modular            requirements
 approach, non-intrusive      • Provides a competitive advantage by offering greater flexibility in
 and standard based               the way computer systems can be used to support the business
 architecture are the         • Lowers implementation costs by increasing reusability; services
 primary deliverable of           can easily be shared across multiple applications
 SOA based architecture.      • Increases IT adaptability; changes--resulting from mergers,
                                  acquisitions, division, package application implementations, etc.--
                                  are easily integrated
                              • Easy       accessibility    of    deployed/published    components
                                  inside/outside company network.

                           Modular Approach
                              • Enables incremental development, deployment, and maintenance;
                                 avoids the need to do costly and risky "big bang" software
                                 implementations
                              • Decreases development effort by reducing complexity (through a
                                 "divide and conquer" approach)
                              • Over time, accelerates deployment of new application
                                 functionality; process becomes mostly assembly of existing
                                 services versus mostly new development
Page 12                                     SOA in Insurance Industry

          Non-intrusive
             • Allows existing investment in IT assets to be leveraged
             • Lowers risk and development effort; avoids the need to rewrite
                 and test existing applications

          Standards-based
             • Platform independence allows companies to use the software and
                hardware of their choice
             • Allows companies to engage in a multi-source strategy, reducing
                threat of vendor lock-in
             • Delivers economies of scale; same technology can be applied to
                address a broad range of business problems
             • Reduces complexity and fragmentation resulting from use of
                proprietary technologies
             • Lowers training requirements; increases available labor pool
Page 13                                                       SOA in Insurance Industry

                        SOA Adoption
                        Adopting SOA should be thought of as strategic direction and not as a
                        project. SOA requires commitment from business and IT leaders.

                        Tactically, some organizations have begun by identifying legacy
                        applications with data sets (or features) that, if exposed, could benefit
                        other systems or processes (then creating services around the access of
                        this data). Strategically, the process beings at the Enterprise level with
                        the identification of services that drive the organization technically and
                        from a business aspect. It is the creation of a high-level blueprint of all
                        the technical and business services that define an organization. This
                        strategic analysis will evolve over time and is used to evaluate
                        subsequent tactical projects to ensure compliance with the overall SOA
                        of the organization.
                        Initially, the challenge of SOA implementation is to properly identify
                        instances where similar business functions are provided by multiple
                        systems within an organization. Secondly, the execution of the identified
                        services must be considered, where the challenge is extracting
                        complexities from individual services. To realize the benefits of reduced
                        complexities, SOA strives to remove the processing (orchestration) of
                        services interaction from individual services; thus increasing service
                        reusability.
                        Creating a SOA Plan
                        Any organization cannot implement a successful SOA without a plan. It
 SOA Adoption:          seems to be obvious, but you would be surprised to know that many large
                        and well-run organizations approach SOA implementation without a
 1. Create a SOA Plan
                        thorough plan. It need not be some huge documentation that no one is
 2. Discover Services   interested to read.
 3. Create Services
                        A good SOA plan should be built upon with following factors in mind:
 4. Govern SOA
                        1. Requirements
                        2. Existing technologies
                        3. Reference or target architecture
                        4. Migration plan
                        5. Financial and resource allocation issues
                        6. Timelines
                        Service Discovery
                        Service discovery begins with an analysis of the complete corporate
                        environment that identifies viable business initiatives that can be
                        realized by an SOA. The business initiatives are then broken down into
                        their component business processes and supporting web services.

                        Discovery via Rationalization
                        A common method for service discovery is a process known as service
                        rationalization, which involves a careful analysis of all the systems and
                        applications providing a specified business function. Through service
                        rationalization, business functionality supported by the least frequently
                        accessed systems can be implemented within those that are more
                        frequently accessed. For example, while it may be possible to process a
                        customer credit in a CRM application, this is most often done via the ERP
                        Billing module.
Page 14                                         SOA in Insurance Industry

          Discovery via Consolidation
          Another method of service discovery is to consolidate services. In this
          step, all services instances are redefined into a consolidated version that
          supports the superset of all the interfaces exposed by the individual
          instances. The goal is to eliminate redundant services, leaving the
          minimal number of services for development and support going forward.
          The consolidation of services in essence creates groupings of services that
          can support multiple interfaces and reduces the total number of services
          to be created.

          Service Orchestration
          Finally, the discovered services need to be combined and coordinated in
          a logical fashion. This is known as service orchestration. Although
          orchestration logic can be built into each service, this approach quickly
          leads to very complex logic. A better is approach is to use what is known
          as Business Process Management (BPM). Using BPM, the complexities of
          individual services are minimized and individual services cannot
          independently invoke other services for completion of a business task.
          The intelligence is placed within a business process layer. Business
          processes are responsible for procedurally invoking each constituent
          services, thereby providing a composite service for the services originally
          requested. So, rather than burdening each individual service with
          processing logic, a separate composite service is created that controls
          the interaction and processing of its services.

          Service Creation
          In the service creation phase, developers use a "web services scorecard"
          that evaluates which web services are the best candidates for
          development according to set of criteria that attempt to balance
          complexity with reuse potential. In tandem with web service
          development, the tem will finalize the supporting architecture required
          to make the SOA a reality. In addition, this phase establishes mechanisms
          to manage, measure, and refine web service performance upon
          deployment.
Page 15                                       SOA in Insurance Industry

          SOA Adoption in Insurance Industry
          SOA is in wide use in the insurance industry today. In Celent’s most
          recent insurance CIO/CTO survey, the majority of respondents across
          both the large (over US$1 billion in annual premiums) and midsize
          (US$100 million to US$1 billion) reported using SOA in mission critical
          systems today, and more than half regard SOA as a critical element of
          their application integration strategies.
Page 16                                                           SOA in Insurance Industry


Case Study
Mitchell International is a leading provider of information, software and technology solutions used to
automate and optimize the automotive P&C claims and vehicle repair process. In 2004, it had premium
income of over 150 million USD, with 10 million claim settlements in a year.

Mitchell had a large number of independent product lines which used to perform specific tasks. These
products were written in older technologies like C, C++, VB, COM etc. With the increasing demand to
market and customer expectations, it was becoming difficult for Mitchell to respond rapidly with huge
independent set of products written in older technologies.

Mitchell needed to streamline its claim process and integration of its huge siloed products while
improving time to market and cutting overall IT expenses by 20-30%.

Mitchell contacted Infogain in 2004 to re-architect their existing infrastructure and make it SOA enabled.
Infogain and Mitchell architect team together prepared a SOA adoption strategy and roadmap for
Mitchell and suggested to use WLI as the integration layer.

By using WLI as the basis of its SOA strategy, Infogain begins to streamline Total Loss claim process for
Mitchell as the first application on SOA. While developing Total Loss claim process Infogain identified
and developed the basic technical services that could potentially be required by other processes or
products.

Infogain journey continued with the identification of more and more reusable technical and business
services.




With increasing number of reusable services, new application development time started reducing and
hence time to market was increasing for Mitchell. As a result Mitchell is tangibly observing the reduction
in IT costs and quick turnaround applications.
Page 17                                                              SOA in Insurance Industry

Conclusion
SOA offers enormous benefits to companies across all industries. All organization strives to get increased
levels of return from IT investments while delivering the level of agility that competitive business
demands. SOA promises to fulfill their desire of high ROI along with agility.

SOA provides the architectural framework for solutions and applications that are Componentized,
Interoperable, Modular and scalable. SOA greatly reduces the development time because of reusability.
The service benefits of reuse offer the potential not just for IT to deliver better service in the near
term, but also to ensure that the benefits increase proportionally over time as levels of reuse increase.

By building solutions based on SOA, insurers can achieve following benefits:
1. The flexibility and scalability to quickly respond to changing customer needs and business
requirements.
2. The ability to integrate best-of-breed partner applications with standard industry-leading softwares
and middlewares.
3. The ability to selectively and incrementally modernize infrastructure while preserving legacy
investments.
4. The opportunity to avoid dependency on propriety approaches.
5. The ability to re-use existing components in new applications and services.

For the insurance industry, SOA and the re-use of existing systems can bring significant business
advantages. The advice is to approach SOA with caution and care and if properly executed, there is no
reason why organizations should not drive new business and maximize existing investments.
Page 18                                                            SOA in Insurance Industry


About Infogain
Infogain Corporation is a technology solution provider helping you to attract, retain and service your
customers better. Combining the deep knowledge of technology and business process and leveraging its
dual shore business model Infogain Corporation helps you to unlock the potential of scattered and
unrelated data though integration and analysis.
We were conceived with an entrepreneurial spirit that aims toward customer delight in all of our
associations. We incubate the leadership attributes of our employees by promoting entrepreneurial
ventures, and combining them with strong technical and business plans.
Our goal is to understand your business, share a common business goal with you, and help you reach your
objectives. We value the long-term relationship we create with our customers and ultimately become an
extension of their businesses.
We strive to empower our customers through our solutions. Our objective is to capitalize on the client's
existing IT infrastructure and unlock the potential of scattered and unrelated data using our Customer
Asset strategy - in which we recognize a company's greatest asset as its customers.
We deliver end-to-end solutions through valuable strategy development, consulting services, and highly
skilled engineering execution. With over a decade of on-time/on-budget delivery, Infogain has built
strong practices and worldwide delivery capabilities in CRM, ERP, integration, and business intelligence;
we cover industry verticals like financial services, telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and
government. And for clients who wish to outsource ongoing operations, Infogain supports these and other
applications in a robust and tested application management environment.
Over the years, Infogain has invested in sustaining a strong infrastructure that is reflected in our world-
class network of people, processes, technology, and knowledge aspects of the work environment in which
we provide end-to-end solutions to our clients worldwide. These investments enhance the productivity
rates per employee while significantly reducing project-centric risks for our clients.
Established in 1990 as Headquarters in the Silicon Valley, California, Infogain has global footprints in UK
and Europe and a SEI-CMM level 5 compliant Global Delivery Center in New Delhi, India started in 1996.
The state-of-the-art development center is equipped with latest technology and networked work
environment with multi-layered controls for enhanced data, network and physical security. The facility
operates around the clock to support clients across multiple continents and time zones. With our global
presence we offer the benefit of localized control for our customers combined with the advantage of low
cost and high quality.
www.infogain.com

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SOA In Insurance Industry 0.2

  • 1. White Paper SOA in Insurance Industry Executive Summary Today's insurance industry is growing at a rapid pace. The instant response to customers and change in business processes is highly desired to get the competitive advantage. As a result of rapid growth Insurance Companies have to deal with following (the list not complete): a. Increasing number of the IT systems involved in supporting their business. b. Increasing number of product lines. c. Increasing number of customers and partners. d. Increasing number of mergers and acquisitions. e. Increasing demand to improve time to market. f. Increasing responsiveness and flexibility. To fulfill the business need and time to market, insurance companies are facing ever-increasing integration challenges. Most of the insurance companies have been managing large number of independent IT systems to serve their business. Most of these systems are self-contained & monolithic and do not have any idea about other systems in the organization. For decades, insurance companies have been evolving away from these self-contained & monolithic systems towards network models. The goal of linking processes with transaction and data is one of the most important goals of an insurer’s IT department to live with dynamics of business. Few insurance companies have achieved a degree of success by implementing a set of EAI applications or proprietary interfaces, but customized interfaces with external application have proven to be expensive to create and maintain. Moreover because of tight coupling it is not easier to replace EAI applications. “Integration” remains a major issue. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) proposes insurers to achieve their integration goals in an efficient manner. SOA helps insurer to achieve elusive goal of loose coupling. SOA address the challenges faced by business and IT managers like: 1. Challenge to deliver new solutions rapidly with fewer resources. 2. Challenge to integrate new solutions with legacy applications etc. With the help of SOA, insurers can construct business application rapidly by utilizing existing services abvilable intra or inter organization. SOA is an IT strategy that organizes the discrete functions contained in enterprise applications into interoperable, standards-based services that can be combined and reused quickly to meet business needs. Few insurance companies have already adopted the Service Oriented Architecture approach and getting competitive advantages over others. The Service Oriented Architecture approach implemented correctly will reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of systems and increase the Return on Investment (ROI) by leveraging existing IT assets and enable true components re-usability.
  • 2. Page 2 SOA in Insurance Industry Purpose This white paper examines the need & implementation of SOA in CONTENTS Insurance industry. This document briefly describes the following: 1 Purpose • Business and technical challenges faced by Insurance Industry 2 Insurance Industry • How SOA can help Insurance Industry to achieve its goals. Challenges • Business benefits from SOA a. Business Challenges b. Technical Challenges • How to adopt SOA 3 Insurance Industry Challenges SOA in Insurance Industry a. Web Services b. Evolution of SOA in Challenges are mounting day by day for insurers. Increased pressure for Insurance Industry profitability translates into a hard look at cost reduction and top-line revenue growth. Profitability is linked to the ability to accurately assess c. SOA reference Model risk and manage customer relationships over time to achieve financial d. SOA benefits success. 4 SOA Adoption Insurers recognize that in order to respond to these pressures, they need to improve efficiency of back-office processing functions while improving 5 SOA Adoption in Insurance the quality of service to the distribution channel. Agents have become Industry more selective in choosing carriers; they are looking to align with an 6 Conclusion organization that not only has a wide product portfolio, but makes it easy Business Challenges In an industry marked by fierce competition, consolidation, and globalization, insurers have to differentiate themselves at all levels, including product innovation, distribution and customer service. At the same time, they need to constantly streamline and enhance the flexibility of policy administration and improve regulatory compliance. Among the challenges insurer face is: • Competitive pressures • Increase complex distribution channels • Slower policy issuance • Streamlining claims service In the competitive world insurers are finding ways • Regulatory compliance to do more with less. Competitive Pressure In the competitive world insurers are finding ways to do more with less. The ability of insurer to survive and show cutting edge depends upon how the insurer take advantage of the opportunities of the market to satisfy the customer needs with efficient profit margins. It sometime leads to addition of new business process or modifications in existing process with minimal impact in current infrastructure.
  • 3. Page 3 SOA in Insurance Industry Increasing complex distribution channels Insurance market is as usual dominated by agent-based sales, distribution Competitive pressures, channels have multiplied and become complex. Insurer finds it difficult Increase complex to leverage its distribution channel and make it easier to work with distribution channels, agents and distributors. To overcome the these complexities of multiple channels serving the market, insurer has to make agents and distributors Slower policy issuance, an integral part of the business and to manage distribution more Streamlining claims effectively, insurers need to become “plug and play” operations. service and Regulatory However, this is also difficult due to the inflexibility of their legacy compliance are the most systems. important business New policy issuance challenges of any The fragmented nature of the insurance value chain has been increased Insurance company. tremendously. To provide a seamless experience to the customer, it requires better orchestration between different steps of the customer acquisition process. Inaccurate data, incomplete data, multiple hands- offs, and the re-keying of data are some of the challenges insurers face when issuing new policies. Streamlining claims service It is well known that retaining existing customers is always more cost- effective than acquiring new ones. The claims experience is pivotal to customer retention. The claims strategy has three fundamental pillars: claims efficiency, claims effectiveness and customer service. With the legacy infrastructure, where various systems are distributed heterogeneously and working in silo, it is hard for insurer to provide customer claims efficiently and in time frame to a lesser extent. Customer is always eager to know the status of claims from the day customer files it. With the systems, which are not synchronized within reasonable time frame, it is almost impossible for insurer to provide accurate status of claims to the customer. Regulatory Compliance Enterprises have to comply with government regulations to stay in business. Insurance industry across geographies is all the more susceptible to regulatory compliance. Each insurance company has different calculation/estimation rules for different geographies. This creates the need for more modular solutions where everyday changing regulatory compliance can be addressed Some recent regulations in US, notably Sarbanes-Oxley, required IT organizations to review and in some cases retrofit all business systems. This diverted scarce IT resources and funding away from development of new business capabilities. Future regulatory changes could require further changes.
  • 4. Page 4 SOA in Insurance Industry IT Challenges IT infrastructure of any company is never being untouched if there is change in business process. The IT of insurance organizations has to deal Flexibility, dealing with with large and increasing number of systems involved in supporting their legacy applications, business, which is result of expanded product lines, distribution channels, addition of new systems mergers and acquisitions. Most insurance companies find themselves and time to market are managing several independent IT systems of different sizes and dozens of business applications spread throughout the enterprise. Some to major the most important challenges faced by IT of the insurance company are: technical challenges of any Insurance company. Flexibility Often called “agility” within the industry, is about rapidly adapting to, and taking advantage of, change. For example, when a new opportunity arrives (e.g., a new product offering is identified) or a business condition changes (e.g., a merger), companies need technology solutions to support this changing environment rapidly and without much hassle. Dealing with Legacy Applications According to the Celent survey of insurance carriers1, 69 percent of core life and 60 percent of core property & casualty carriers retain legacy systems. Numerous mergers and acquisitions mean many insurers have multiple legacy systems, resulting in siloed processes, data, and management. Legacy IT systems are found hard to synchronize with the other application in the enterprise and with increasing number of legacy systems IT house of insurer needs to find the ways of handling the legacy systems. Addition of New Systems Addition of new IT application/systems is obvious during merger, acquisitions and expansion. To provide customer seamless service, all of new applications have to interact with the other application in the enterprise. These systems are not readily available to integrate with current IT infrastructure. Integration of these systems requires recourses and time; due to pressure from business stakeholder, IT departments find it is difficult to rapidly incorporate chagnes. Time to market It is response time in updating/upgrading the IT infrastructure to reflect the changes in business. High time to market potentially is not considered to be good offering by IT solution hub. In the complex distributed heterogeneous environment, the challenging factor for IT infrastructure is promptly align with the rapidly changing business rules & processes and meditate on the changes in business process.
  • 5. Page 5 SOA in Insurance Industry SOA in Insurance Industry In any industry, be it Insurance or Manufacturing or any other, Enterprise Service Oriented Architecture (EA) give the true picture of the organization’s IT systems. Architecture is an How systems are related to each other, how systems are integrated with approach to Enterprise each other, how much tightly coupled systems are, how business processes are define? Answer to these questions drives the IT strategies Architecture where major of the organizations, for the evolution of IT systems. components or software pieces are exposed as Service Oriented Architecture is an approach to Enterprise Architecture “service”. The process of where major components or software pieces are exposed as “service”. exposing existing The process of exposing existing components and software pieces as services abstracts the complexity of the individual component/software components and piece and hence enables real loose coupling. By converting software software pieces as elements/pieces into services, SOA enables organization to reuse existing services abstracts the services and create new solutions rapidly and with less money. SOA complexity of the makes EA flexible, easier to modify, easier to evolve with less number of individual resources. component/software piece and hence enables Web Services real loose coupling. The SOA is an IT approach which has been around for quite a while. Organization has been practicing this approach for many years to improve their EA architecture. There are quite a few numbers of technologies which have attempted to realize the goal of SOA, where each software element/component in the organization available as a service. Web Services is one of the effective ways to make a software element/component as a service. Webservices are tactical in nature, while SOA is a way of thinking about building software components. Web Services are based upon open interoperable standards, free from vendor specific locks. These open interoperable standards enable to make any type of software element/component available as service irrespective of the hardware, operating systems, and programming language. Web Service is not the only way to make an SOA, however it is the most effective and matured way of achieving SOA. Evolution of SOA in Insurance Industry Monolithic Systems In the olden days most of the insurance companies used to build applications with the intention of fulfilling the requirement of specific business functionality or used to target a specific department in the organization. Most of these systems are self contained & monolithic and do not have any idea about other systems in the organization. The need of time & business and evolution in IT enables organization to integrate disparate systems with the help of proprietary interfaces and EAI application.
  • 6. Page 6 SOA in Insurance Industry The systems communicated with each other using custom/proprietary interfaces, so tightly coupled. The support for those custom/proprietary interfaces was expensive and even sometimes not available because of the obsolete technologies. A typical traditional insurance industry’s IT architecture integrated using custom interfaces is depicted below: Distributed Systems With increasing demand and evolution in technologies, new specialized software applications like CRM, SCM etc are developed. These applications quickly become interdependent and requiring each other to complete the core business processes. The organization’s business processes were not only interacting with internal systems but also with external systems. The architecture where more than one computer system participates in the completion of a business process is called distributed architecture. The unavailability of flexible integration technology, high cost of custom integration technologies caused organizations to take advice from integration focused & technology companies. These integration oriented service/technology companies introduced EAI to facilitate integration in the distributed environment.
  • 7. Page 7 SOA in Insurance Industry A typical insurance industry’s distributed IT architecture integrated using EAI components/modules is depicted below: Service Oriented Architecture Software as a “service” is making major impact on the field of Enterprise Architecture. Service Oriented Architecture approach is making the high level of interoperability between systems, improving the alignment between technology and business processes. Because of its open standards, the SOA has the potential to deliver vast improvements in IT cost control, business agility, and business process efficiency. SOA makes it a simple matter to change hardware and software, as well as technologies and even their locations. This makes business managers highly independent to pursue with their business goals with fewer technology constraints. A typical insurance industry’s distributed IT architecture integrated using SOA approach is depicted below:
  • 8. Page 8 SOA in Insurance Industry EAI SOA Based on Web Services Based on proprietary technology Based on open standards. Relatively tight coupling between Loosely coupled systems. systems Minimal vendor interoperability Standard-driven vendor interoperability. Restricted reusability of EAI broken Highly reusable service interfaces by any SOA-enabled interfaces application.
  • 9. Page 9 SOA in Insurance Industry SOA Reference Architecture SOA Reference Architecture provides the blue-print of enterprise architecture based upon the building blocks of SOA. The starting point for building the reference architecture is services. An SOA is built around the concept of a business and technical service. Making software components/elements/units as a reusable piece of logic designed service to execute a piece of business process with standard access and invocation interfaces. So the first capability of any SOA reference architecture has to deal with service identification and creation, whether formed of old components or newly written ones. Once these services have been created, the power of an SOA is derived from joining these services together. Here is an example of a SOA reference architecture created by Infogain for one of its client (Mitchell).
  • 10. Page 10 SOA in Insurance Industry SOA Benefits SOA is not only beneficial from IT perspective but also from business perspective. It is extremely important to know that SOA helps organization to streamline their business process and extremely quick in creating and modifying business processes and lowering IT budgets. SOA can be defined as a set of design and organizational principles that expose business logic and data as independent reusable services. The overall objective of SOA is to structure the organization such that business vision and requirements can drive IT towards the same goals without technology impeding achievement of objectives. Exposing IT assets as reusable services gives business managers the ability to capitalize on previously unrealized integration points. Business Benefits from SOA Lower IT Budgets Lower IT Budgets, High Due to increased competition and lower margins, companies are looking ROI on IT Projects, for lower budgets in managing their IT systems. According to Tom Promotes alignment of IT Pohlmann of Forrester Research, CIOs are seeing value in cutting costs and getting more out of their prior investments. with Business, Higher Business flexibility are The SOA model has the ability to decrease IT budgets in several ways. the primary tangible business benefits of a. Since the underlying applications and technology to support an SOA are SOA. already in place at most large organizations, the development of service components is more about integrating existing application and business logic than it is about writing completely new systems. b. SOA can lower IT budgets is by extending the useful life of certain business applications. Many of today’s large business applications require frequent upgrades and, depending on their length of service, may need to be re-architected or replaced to meet new business requirements. With a SOA in place, IT organizations have a new method for meeting business requirements. Functionality from various applications, exposed via the services layer, can be integrated to create new applications, views of data, or automated processes. The continued use of IT assets, therefore, also contributes to a decrease in IT budgets. c. The SOA inherently changes an IT organization’s definition of development projects. Today, many IT organizations are still pursuing bigger implementations with tremendous amounts of capital, resources, and time dedicated to projects – and with no guarantee of success. With a SOA, projects are smaller in scope and are completed in less time. As a result, the capital investments and resources required to complete these projects are quite less.
  • 11. Page 11 SOA in Insurance Industry Higher ROI on IT projects Reduction in development timeframes and the resources dedicated to these projects directly impact the costs associated with a project. Reducing the costs of development projects will positively impact ROI. Promotes alignment of IT with Business SOA adds value to an organization due to its ability to align the IT organization with the business drivers of an organization. The process of abstraction that is completed as part of SOA removes application specific complexities. This allows IT resources to focus on how to best use their portfolio of applications and data stores to meet the business requirements. Higher Business flexibility SOA contribution in the business flexibility is recommendable. According to a recent study of Fortune 500 companies, over 80% of companies had altered their business model in a given two-year period. Nearly 66% of these companies stated that their business model changes had been constrained by inflexible IT5. The speed of change is likely to increase going forward and business managers will have to continually adjust business models to meet customer and competitive pressures. To be effective, these adjustments will have to be implemented rapidly and without the interference of IT limitations. Although a SOA will not remove all IT obstacles, a well- designed SOA does give IT managers a new method for creating solutions based on proven business applications. IT Benefits from SOA Loosely coupled architecture • Increases organizational agility; allows companies to easily Loosely coupled assemble, and modify business processes in response to market architecture, modular requirements approach, non-intrusive • Provides a competitive advantage by offering greater flexibility in and standard based the way computer systems can be used to support the business architecture are the • Lowers implementation costs by increasing reusability; services primary deliverable of can easily be shared across multiple applications SOA based architecture. • Increases IT adaptability; changes--resulting from mergers, acquisitions, division, package application implementations, etc.-- are easily integrated • Easy accessibility of deployed/published components inside/outside company network. Modular Approach • Enables incremental development, deployment, and maintenance; avoids the need to do costly and risky "big bang" software implementations • Decreases development effort by reducing complexity (through a "divide and conquer" approach) • Over time, accelerates deployment of new application functionality; process becomes mostly assembly of existing services versus mostly new development
  • 12. Page 12 SOA in Insurance Industry Non-intrusive • Allows existing investment in IT assets to be leveraged • Lowers risk and development effort; avoids the need to rewrite and test existing applications Standards-based • Platform independence allows companies to use the software and hardware of their choice • Allows companies to engage in a multi-source strategy, reducing threat of vendor lock-in • Delivers economies of scale; same technology can be applied to address a broad range of business problems • Reduces complexity and fragmentation resulting from use of proprietary technologies • Lowers training requirements; increases available labor pool
  • 13. Page 13 SOA in Insurance Industry SOA Adoption Adopting SOA should be thought of as strategic direction and not as a project. SOA requires commitment from business and IT leaders. Tactically, some organizations have begun by identifying legacy applications with data sets (or features) that, if exposed, could benefit other systems or processes (then creating services around the access of this data). Strategically, the process beings at the Enterprise level with the identification of services that drive the organization technically and from a business aspect. It is the creation of a high-level blueprint of all the technical and business services that define an organization. This strategic analysis will evolve over time and is used to evaluate subsequent tactical projects to ensure compliance with the overall SOA of the organization. Initially, the challenge of SOA implementation is to properly identify instances where similar business functions are provided by multiple systems within an organization. Secondly, the execution of the identified services must be considered, where the challenge is extracting complexities from individual services. To realize the benefits of reduced complexities, SOA strives to remove the processing (orchestration) of services interaction from individual services; thus increasing service reusability. Creating a SOA Plan Any organization cannot implement a successful SOA without a plan. It SOA Adoption: seems to be obvious, but you would be surprised to know that many large and well-run organizations approach SOA implementation without a 1. Create a SOA Plan thorough plan. It need not be some huge documentation that no one is 2. Discover Services interested to read. 3. Create Services A good SOA plan should be built upon with following factors in mind: 4. Govern SOA 1. Requirements 2. Existing technologies 3. Reference or target architecture 4. Migration plan 5. Financial and resource allocation issues 6. Timelines Service Discovery Service discovery begins with an analysis of the complete corporate environment that identifies viable business initiatives that can be realized by an SOA. The business initiatives are then broken down into their component business processes and supporting web services. Discovery via Rationalization A common method for service discovery is a process known as service rationalization, which involves a careful analysis of all the systems and applications providing a specified business function. Through service rationalization, business functionality supported by the least frequently accessed systems can be implemented within those that are more frequently accessed. For example, while it may be possible to process a customer credit in a CRM application, this is most often done via the ERP Billing module.
  • 14. Page 14 SOA in Insurance Industry Discovery via Consolidation Another method of service discovery is to consolidate services. In this step, all services instances are redefined into a consolidated version that supports the superset of all the interfaces exposed by the individual instances. The goal is to eliminate redundant services, leaving the minimal number of services for development and support going forward. The consolidation of services in essence creates groupings of services that can support multiple interfaces and reduces the total number of services to be created. Service Orchestration Finally, the discovered services need to be combined and coordinated in a logical fashion. This is known as service orchestration. Although orchestration logic can be built into each service, this approach quickly leads to very complex logic. A better is approach is to use what is known as Business Process Management (BPM). Using BPM, the complexities of individual services are minimized and individual services cannot independently invoke other services for completion of a business task. The intelligence is placed within a business process layer. Business processes are responsible for procedurally invoking each constituent services, thereby providing a composite service for the services originally requested. So, rather than burdening each individual service with processing logic, a separate composite service is created that controls the interaction and processing of its services. Service Creation In the service creation phase, developers use a "web services scorecard" that evaluates which web services are the best candidates for development according to set of criteria that attempt to balance complexity with reuse potential. In tandem with web service development, the tem will finalize the supporting architecture required to make the SOA a reality. In addition, this phase establishes mechanisms to manage, measure, and refine web service performance upon deployment.
  • 15. Page 15 SOA in Insurance Industry SOA Adoption in Insurance Industry SOA is in wide use in the insurance industry today. In Celent’s most recent insurance CIO/CTO survey, the majority of respondents across both the large (over US$1 billion in annual premiums) and midsize (US$100 million to US$1 billion) reported using SOA in mission critical systems today, and more than half regard SOA as a critical element of their application integration strategies.
  • 16. Page 16 SOA in Insurance Industry Case Study Mitchell International is a leading provider of information, software and technology solutions used to automate and optimize the automotive P&C claims and vehicle repair process. In 2004, it had premium income of over 150 million USD, with 10 million claim settlements in a year. Mitchell had a large number of independent product lines which used to perform specific tasks. These products were written in older technologies like C, C++, VB, COM etc. With the increasing demand to market and customer expectations, it was becoming difficult for Mitchell to respond rapidly with huge independent set of products written in older technologies. Mitchell needed to streamline its claim process and integration of its huge siloed products while improving time to market and cutting overall IT expenses by 20-30%. Mitchell contacted Infogain in 2004 to re-architect their existing infrastructure and make it SOA enabled. Infogain and Mitchell architect team together prepared a SOA adoption strategy and roadmap for Mitchell and suggested to use WLI as the integration layer. By using WLI as the basis of its SOA strategy, Infogain begins to streamline Total Loss claim process for Mitchell as the first application on SOA. While developing Total Loss claim process Infogain identified and developed the basic technical services that could potentially be required by other processes or products. Infogain journey continued with the identification of more and more reusable technical and business services. With increasing number of reusable services, new application development time started reducing and hence time to market was increasing for Mitchell. As a result Mitchell is tangibly observing the reduction in IT costs and quick turnaround applications.
  • 17. Page 17 SOA in Insurance Industry Conclusion SOA offers enormous benefits to companies across all industries. All organization strives to get increased levels of return from IT investments while delivering the level of agility that competitive business demands. SOA promises to fulfill their desire of high ROI along with agility. SOA provides the architectural framework for solutions and applications that are Componentized, Interoperable, Modular and scalable. SOA greatly reduces the development time because of reusability. The service benefits of reuse offer the potential not just for IT to deliver better service in the near term, but also to ensure that the benefits increase proportionally over time as levels of reuse increase. By building solutions based on SOA, insurers can achieve following benefits: 1. The flexibility and scalability to quickly respond to changing customer needs and business requirements. 2. The ability to integrate best-of-breed partner applications with standard industry-leading softwares and middlewares. 3. The ability to selectively and incrementally modernize infrastructure while preserving legacy investments. 4. The opportunity to avoid dependency on propriety approaches. 5. The ability to re-use existing components in new applications and services. For the insurance industry, SOA and the re-use of existing systems can bring significant business advantages. The advice is to approach SOA with caution and care and if properly executed, there is no reason why organizations should not drive new business and maximize existing investments.
  • 18. Page 18 SOA in Insurance Industry About Infogain Infogain Corporation is a technology solution provider helping you to attract, retain and service your customers better. Combining the deep knowledge of technology and business process and leveraging its dual shore business model Infogain Corporation helps you to unlock the potential of scattered and unrelated data though integration and analysis. We were conceived with an entrepreneurial spirit that aims toward customer delight in all of our associations. We incubate the leadership attributes of our employees by promoting entrepreneurial ventures, and combining them with strong technical and business plans. Our goal is to understand your business, share a common business goal with you, and help you reach your objectives. We value the long-term relationship we create with our customers and ultimately become an extension of their businesses. We strive to empower our customers through our solutions. Our objective is to capitalize on the client's existing IT infrastructure and unlock the potential of scattered and unrelated data using our Customer Asset strategy - in which we recognize a company's greatest asset as its customers. We deliver end-to-end solutions through valuable strategy development, consulting services, and highly skilled engineering execution. With over a decade of on-time/on-budget delivery, Infogain has built strong practices and worldwide delivery capabilities in CRM, ERP, integration, and business intelligence; we cover industry verticals like financial services, telecom, healthcare, manufacturing, retail, and government. And for clients who wish to outsource ongoing operations, Infogain supports these and other applications in a robust and tested application management environment. Over the years, Infogain has invested in sustaining a strong infrastructure that is reflected in our world- class network of people, processes, technology, and knowledge aspects of the work environment in which we provide end-to-end solutions to our clients worldwide. These investments enhance the productivity rates per employee while significantly reducing project-centric risks for our clients. Established in 1990 as Headquarters in the Silicon Valley, California, Infogain has global footprints in UK and Europe and a SEI-CMM level 5 compliant Global Delivery Center in New Delhi, India started in 1996. The state-of-the-art development center is equipped with latest technology and networked work environment with multi-layered controls for enhanced data, network and physical security. The facility operates around the clock to support clients across multiple continents and time zones. With our global presence we offer the benefit of localized control for our customers combined with the advantage of low cost and high quality. www.infogain.com