SunGard Sherwood Systems has chosen a development strategy for its Amarta life insurance software that will adopt Microsoft’s .NET Framework and run on Intel Itanium 2 servers.

Aimed at the high end of the market, Amarta is used by carriers with 250,000 to millions of policies.

“It is enterprise-wide and can support multi-country, multi-jurisdictional, and multiple business lines,” said Clare Porter, head of global marketing for SunGard Sherwood.

As a primary step in their collaborative efforts, SunGard and Microsoft are cooperating on the creation of the high level architecture and prototype of the Amarta life administration solution on the .NET Framework. The conceptual model was unveiled at the SunGard Europa customer conference in Paris.

“Insurers increasingly view Microsoft as an enterprise partner, and are realizing the benefits that Microsoft technology delivers,” said Dennis Maroney, managing director, worldwide insurance industry for Microsoft. “Working with SunGard, with whom we have a wide ranging relationship, is a natural progression for us to deliver enhanced experiences for our joint insurance customers.”

The .NET Framework will provide carriers with a lower total cost of ownership, a significantly better user experience, and allow them to operate more effectively because it will improve their access to policy and customer information, explained Gordon Ejsmond-Frey, insurance industry manager for Microsoft in EMEA.

“Sixty-four bit computing in time will make a huge difference because life insurance applications are highly intensive for business analysis and business intelligence. Carriers are working with a huge mass of data and trying to establish patterns within it.”

.NET is playing an increasingly important role in the insurance industry, according to Matthew Josefowicz, manager of the insurance group at Celent, IT strategy research and advisory firm. “Agility and accessibility are two key principles that insurers have top-of-mind when making IT decisions, and service-oriented architectures, which .NET systems can play a key role in enabling, are helping systems be more adaptable to changing business requirements and more easily integrated with the rest of a complex infrastructure.”

SunGard will begin its technology refresh with the presentation layer, said Porter. Although a recent Celent report places the Sherwood technology as some of the most modern in the business, SunGard is making a conscious effort to refresh its technology and has decided to use the appropriate Microsoft technologies for that upgrade, added Porter.

“Microsoft technologies provide us the ability to have a smart client that provides a rich client experience but at a lower operating cost.” Although two large American carriers use Amarta now, SunGard will initially focus new development on Europe and then re-launch its new version of Amarta in the US.