How is Analyzer being used today in the finance and insurance industry?

Citigroup is using Analyzer to monitor its global IT infrastructure. Major insurance companies are using it to evaluate their competitive positions – to decide whether or not to compete in various markets and determine premiums in those markets. Residential and commercial real estate companies are using Analyzer to evaluate price changes, default rates and a host of other metrics affecting their business. These are just a few examples.

Do you see a difference in how analytics and business intelligence tools are used today compared to five or ten years ago?

There is a big difference. Traditionally analytics focused on a small group of executives and analysts. Today, analytics are also used by the company workforce. It’s a much wider audience and this brings with it many ramifications for how the tools need to be designed and deployed. There is a wider variety of skill levels than there were when the users were a highly focused group that could receive specific training. Today’s users need to be able to learn as they do.

With enterprise-wide or pervasive BI, the number of users also presents a greater workload for IT. Analytics needs to be intuitive to decrease that load. There is an emphasis now on lower costs and analytics need to be scalable across the enterprise and able to handle mission-critical functions. There used to be client software; now the ideal is 100% zero-footprint Web browser-based software for more flexible and cost-effective deployment options.

Given that change, who are your target users in today’s marketplace?

Analyzer is specifically designed for non-technical business users, a large and important group of people whose daily decisions can make or break a company. They have to be able to work with information on their own, but the fact that they are non-technical does not mean they are unsophisticated. They need powerful and intuitive tools that can let them interact directly with their data and get better, more useful reports.

Strategy Companion’s Web site says that Analyzer is making Self-Service Business Intelligence a reality. Describe your vision of Self-Service BI.

There has been this infamous, traditional bottleneck between business users and the IT department where there are never enough resources in IT to satisfy the information requests from the business side. Empowering those business users is a way of breaking that bottleneck. We are letting those users access the data in SQL Server’s OLAP cubes independently, drill down, dig deeper into the business, and create new visualizations. We support the natural iterative nature of analysis, where one question leads to another. You have to be able to react to that independently without calling IT between questions and losing momentum. Self-service BI allows analysis to occur almost at the speed of thought.

To what extent are clients interested in extending BI beyond the enterprise? How does Analyzer enable them to do it?

In some cases clients extend BI to their customers and charge money for that service, turning BI into a profit center. In other cases the goal is not revenue generation but effectiveness – they might be helping partners gain a better understanding of the status of their joint business opportunities, for example. In some cases clients provide software-as-a-service (Saas) hosted versions of our product in which our customers use our product to become information providers, offering a combination of the data they have amassed along with the interactive Analyzer reports and dashboards. In other cases third-party original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) embed Analyzer into another application.

By providing 100% zero-footprint analytics, clients can extend the reach of BI outside the walls of their company because users only need to have Internet Explorer to access it.

Once a report has been generated using Analyzer, what kinds of tools do users have at their fingertips for analyzing or further drilling down into a report’s data?

Within a pivot table, where a lot of the action occurs, there is drill-down capability and powerful analysis functionality. Integration with Reporting Services is one way we support drill-down to the underlying relational data. There are several dozen different styles of charts and visualizations such as interactive maps color-coded by region, heat maps, stock charts, histograms, and many others. We provide free on-demand training on our web site that describes how to create charts, intelligent maps, reports, pivot tables and other features. We hear a lot of positive feedback about the impressive look-and-feel of Analyzer reports and dashboards.

Describe what it means to be 100% true zero-footprint. How does this configuration lessen the burden on IT managers?

100% true zero-footprint means that absolutely no software at all needs to be downloaded in order to use the solution. Whether they are End Users, Report Designers, or Administrators, they only need Internet Explorer 6 or higher and they are good to go. What this means is it’s a lot less work for IT and a lot less costly. There is no worry about downloading to hundreds or thousands of desktops, keeping the client software updated or making sure there is compatible software or hardware on the desktop. Reduced complexity is the number one factor leading to successful pervasive business intelligence.

Analyzer is the most deeply integrated BI solution on the Microsoft platform. What is the significance of this integration in terms of the advantages it offers users?

Of course, there is the cost advantage of the Microsoft platform. There is also the advantage of user familiarity with Internet Explorer, Excel and SharePoint. The skill sets are already there, which helps support ease-of-use for non-technical business users as well as IT. There is also a lot of flexibility in how to deliver information because of how we are integrated with SQL Server and with Analysis Services, SQL Server’s Business Intelligence engine. We support all of the different types of cubes including MOLAP [Multidimensional Online Analytical Processing], ROLAP [Relational OLAP] and HOLAP [Hybrid OLAP]. All of this can be accessed through SharePoint, Excel and even from within Outlook. For example, a user can not only view and interact with an Analyzer report in Outlook, they can also have it automatically emailed to them, based either on a pre-determined schedule or on some data-driven condition.

To what extent have OEMs integrated Analyzer with their products?

OEMs in a number of verticals, including Finance and Insurance, have bundled Analyzer as the Business Intelligence front-end to their solutions. There are two ways to do this. The easier and faster way is simply to make Analyzer’s reports and dashboards accessible through Internet Explorer (v. 6 or higher). This requires no additional programming to set up. The other way is to use our comprehensive set of Web Services which allow programmers to more tightly embed Analyzer within their applications. Typically these are ISV applications, but they could also be internal apps. We have OEM relationships in Finance & Insurance where Analyzer is used to provide the reporting, analytics, and dashboards for the value-added finance/insurance data our customers have created.

www.strategycompanion.com

Northwestern Mutual: Web Site Innovation

When Milwaukee-WI based Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company began an overhaul and redesign of its Web site in early 2009, the goal was to create a rich and engaging brand experience that would be easier to navigate by current and prospective clients and easier to update and maintain by internal personnel.

With help from strategic provider Infosys, the site was rebuilt on SharePoint and re-launched within a year. Using out-of the-box functionality, an estimated 400 static Web pages were replaced with 12 templates. A key improvement in the site for Northwestern Mutual is that SharePoint functionality allows business users to make content changes and updates to the Web site directly, and as a result the changes can be made as quickly as in fifteen minutes. Previously, requests for even minor content changes had to be routed to the IT department, and would compete for priority with other IT requests, sometimes taking weeks or as long as a month to be completed.

“Eighty percent of content changes are able to be done without IS,” says Paul Brown, MIS director. “Any changes in templates, navigation or code, we will be involved.” Still, Brown estimates that the reduction of content-based changes has shaved several hours off the Information Systems department’s workload weekly.

The company uses SharePoint’s version controls and version previews as part of its content management process for tracking and approving changes. In fact, from a compliance standpoint, SharePoint’s versioning tools have made checks and approvals easier as pages and content can all be routed electronically, cutting down on the amount of paperwork.

From a customer-facing perspective, changes were significant as well. As a company, Northwestern Mutual puts a strong emphasis on personal relationships, conducting 100 percent of its business through face-to-face meetings as opposed to online. While the new site is not an e-commerce site, the Web team focused on making the site easier for current and prospective customers to find the information and contacts they were seeking. In focus groups, prospective customers reported easier navigation and fewer steps involved in finding a local office or contacting a financial representative.

Looking forward, the company is considering moving an intranet-type system to SharePoint that would give internal users shared access to business projects and tools. Perhaps more significantly, the company is also considering adding features that might increase the Web site’s role in enhancing face-to-face relationships with clients.

“With Web content, our end goal is to allow for personalization of the experience based on preferences,” says Matt Bryant, Deputy Director – Application Architecture. “In this way, SharePoint sets us up for the future.”

CS STARS Risk Goggles: Risk Technology Innovation

Bill Diaz, President, CS STARS

Risk Goggles, from risk management technology provider CS STARS, a business unit of Marsh, provides clients with location-based risk data that they can interact with and incorporate into risk management strategies. The .NET-based tool, available through STARS Enterprise, merges Internet-based mapping with intelligence tools such as on-map alerting, Key Performance Indicator (KPI) data, and external risk data such as weather, demographics, geographic surveys and regional news.

Clients can quickly identify risk management events or threats and use mapping technology to assess how specific geographic areas may be affected. The tool leverages Dashboard and Silverlight and is built primarily on Microsoft Buisiness Intelligence technology. A prototype next version of the product is currently being built on Bing Maps with a SQL Server 2008 R2 and geospacial components on the back end.

www.csstars.com

RMS: Innovation in High Performance Computing

As the leading provider of products and services for managing catastrophe risk, RMS offers technology for managing risks associated with events ranging from earthquakes and floods to pandemics and terrorism. Understandably, it’s a CPU intensive business.

“Not only does it require a lot of computing power for simple results, but the more you can run them , the better your idea of the risks you are taking,” says Philippe Stephan, CTO.

To that end, RMS has been embracing high performance computing, moving its products to Microsoft Windows HPC Server 2008 to boost processing power in a way that is cost-effective and manageable from an IT management standpoint. By distributing applications on large numbers of cores, performance increases linearly. While in the past the company had seen advantages with 16 cores, it is now seeing 60 percent efficiencies on more than 100 cores, and it’s still early days. The next products to include HPC will be released in August and more definitive benchmarking numbers will be available then. Within a year the company hopes to increase its grid further to hundreds or 1,000 cores.

The increased power will not only deliver faster computations for clients, but will give them more possibilities as they will now be able to run more scenarios, more stress tests or change parameters more often than they were previously able.

“It’s a bit of an arms race in terms of performance,” Stephan says.” What we are doing is not only improving the quality of the models but giving users more controls in terms of modeling behavior.” 

From a technology standpoint, the move to HPC Server 2008 has been smooth, according to Stephan, with the main effort being the reworking of programs to take advantage of HPC. “Porting our services to Microsoft HPC has been quite seamless. The challenge has been at the application level – we have to think about parallelism where things used to run sequentially. It’s a matter of reviewing your code, and looking at how you parallelize and spread processing over multiple cores to take advantage of this new power,” he says.

The long term plan is to further empower clients by harnessing the power of an increasing number of cores.

“High performance computing takes us from running models in a week down to days or hours, and down the road – with larger scale grid computing – we aim at delivering results in minutes,” says Stephan.

Aviva: Intranet Innovation

Aviva is the largest insurance group in the UK and the fifth largest in the world, with operations in 28 countries. It’s “One Intranet” program, with the vision “One Aviva, twice the value,” has not only streamlined communication to the firms’ 60,000 employees, but also has enabled collaboration among employees located across the world.

The firm used SharePoint 2007 to deliver a platform that includes a global knowledge management solution, sophisticated content management, a collaboration suite and an intramural social network. The platform allows management to communicate with the whole firm at once more efficiently, but perhaps more significant is how it can be used by employees. Employees can now use the intranet to seek out the company’s experts in different subject areas around the world, collaborate with one another, post queries that can be answered by colleagues in different countries, and access a series of business applications that can help them do their work. They can even use the platform to arrange gatherings, sports teams, blog or create groups.

As a cloud computing-based hosted solution, the Aviva intranet is the first hosted solution of its size in Europe. By taking advantage of cloud computing, Aviva has access to highly scalable resources with less demand on its internal IT staff. This model also helped the firm adhere to an aggressive time frame for implementing the platform.

Aon: Policy Administration Innovation

Aon’s AuMine application is the principal policy administration systems for Aon Risk Services containing functions like client management, policy management, and document production. AuMine is a globalized application developed in .NET with consolidated functionality from a variety of internal systems on various platforms. For cost reasons, Aon decided to consolidate and rationalize on one platform and chose Microsoft. As a first step in this effort, the underlying data storage has migrated from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server. Using one platform stack, Aon will simplify its architecture, reduce significant cost, and enable a more agile/flexible architecture for growing the various policy lines automated through AuMine.

It is our pleasure to announce this year’s five Insurance Innovator Awards. The five winning projects demonstrate that innovation continues at a strong pace in the financial industry as customers and clients are increasingly technically-savvy and consequently more demanding. Many benefits that we once were grateful for – access to information, speed, flexibility – are now necessities that we take for granted.

As a result, our winners have revamped their infrastructures to ensure that they are not only providing these necessities adequately, but laying the groundwork to stay ahead of tomorrow’s curve. For our five winners, that means that Aviva’s intranet is now a global knowledge management solution;  Northwestern Mutual’s Web site has been thoroughly modernized and can be  updated quickly by business users; Aon’s AuMine policy administration system is now more flexible and agile for managing various policy lines; CS STARS’s Risk Goggles incorporates Internet-based mapping into risk analysis; and RMS can now tap into the power boost of high-performance computing.

“Microsoft focuses on helping insurance firms utilize technology to amplify the impact their people can deliver to drive business success,” said Bill Hartnett, general manager, U.S. Insurance Industry Solutions, Microsoft Corp. “The winners of the Windows in Financial Services’ 2010 Innovator Awards have shown that technology can be a strategic asset that can help drive revenue and promote operational efficiencies. We applaud Aon, Aviva, CS STARS, RMS and Northwestern Mutual for their innovative solutions on the Microsoft software platform.”

“Innovation at the financial sector is proving to be a challenge accosting all entities in the financial realm, especially due to an economy that has had seismic rumblings,” said Joe Viviani, publisher, Windows in Financial Services. “This year’s 2010 WFS award winners were able to capture, isolate and overcome a business issue with a solid innovation – and extended its capabilities beyond the traditional limits. Whether on a local or global scale, each of these winners has been able to seamlessly integrate their new technologies into the daily workflow DNA and as a result, save time and worry. We salute all the entries and the winners who took the time to utilize their resources through the Microsoft technology platform to find the right business answer for their distinct business needs.”

Congratulations to all our winning innovators!

Aviva: Intranet Innovation

Northwestern Mutual: Web Site Innovation

Aon: Policy Administration Innovation

RMS: High Performance Computing Innovation

CS STARS Risk Goggles: Risk Technology Innovation

Financial Services has been undergoing intense competition and scrutiny in recent months. This is causing the war on managing content in financial services to escalate rapidly and complacency is a recipe for disaster.

Our research with customers, solution providers and financial institutions confirms the fact that those with the best content management systems will be the likely victors in the end.

The customers and prospects of financial institutions have so many options to choose from that even those financial institutions with big brand names can be also-rans if they don’t anticipate the financial needs of their clients through information management.

And content management is not only about knowing your customer or customer acquisition and retention. It is also all about keeping fully compliant with a plethora of new industry regulations and increased oversight of risk.

However, winning the battle for content management is not simple. Integration with legacy and existing platforms is more critical than ever as financial institutions rev for the future by deploying newer technologies including SharePoint.

Those that get this right will not only be more fiscally efficient but more capable in servicing their clients and responding to regulatory requirements.

Our upcoming report is a must read for those in financial services that are new to SharePoint, adopting SharePoint as a extension of their current environment or looking to integrate SharePoint as bridge to the future.

This latest report from Windows in Financial Services will focus on

• Growth in Enterprise Content Management (ECM) and how it pertains to financial services (banking, insurance and capital markets)

• Where and how SharePoint provides solutions to this industry

• What some of the major players such as EMC, IBM, Oracle and Open Text are doing

• How Business Process Management (BPM), case management and Business Intelligence (BI) are connecting their solutions to deliver increased value across this spectrum of converging technologies

• What the Microsoft partner community is doing to create value across the ECM, BPM, BI value chain

• And what are some of the best practices for the industry

Financial Services and the science of managing documents and digital content have historically gone hand-in-hand. Indeed, the manufactured goods of financial services primarily include information and data such as paper and digital documents.

And the growth of these goods continues to increase dramatically. According to IDC and their Enterprise Storage Consumption Model

• Unstructured data is growing at a rate of 62% CAGR

• And transaction data is growing at a rate of 22% CAGR

Even in a down economy, Gartner research found that despite dropping from double-digit growth between 2004 and 2007, enterprise content management (ECM) managed to see single-digit growth in 2008, ending off with $3.3 billion in worldwide software licence and maintenance revenue. And according to Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrant for ECM, the market is expected to resume a healthy growth rate by next year, with predictions exceeding $5.1 billion in worldwide software licence revenue by 2013.

Over this same period, SharePoint has been developing and evolving rapidly. Its capabilities and uses are expanding and its ability to connect and share information with major traditional data repositories from IBM (FileNet), EMC (Documentum), Open Text (LiveLink) and Oracle have increased substantially. In addition, Microsoft has placed increased emphasis around workflow and business analytics. These capabilities have formed the backbone of Microsoft’s and the industry’s value strategy going forward.

This report is based on input from the Microsoft partner community, clients and experts in the field. Look for the release of this report in the summer of 2010.

Time: 10 AM EDT

Hosted by Mark R. Gilbert
Research VP

Many enterprises are considering significant SharePoint investments. This strong interest has acted as a forcing function, causing enterprises to strategize on related issues such as how to enhance performance, optimize resource investments, coexistence options with other enterprise content management (ECM) systems, as well as office productivity applications and overall governance. Learn how to avoid the pitfalls and deliver clear benefits to the business.

What You Will Learn

Gartner analysts will discuss the following topics with you:

o What is SharePoint, and how is it affecting the portal, content and collaboration markets?

o What strategic role should SharePoint play in enterprises as information infrastructure, and can it coexist with other applications?

o How should enterprises manage their SharePoint installations for efficiency, effectiveness and proper governance?

http://my.gartner.com/portal/server.pt?open=512&objID=202&mode=2&PageID=5553&resId=1365819&ref=Webinar-Calendar

Location:  Grapevine, Texas

The IASA 2010 Annual Educational Conference and Business show provides the most comprehensive educational program and business show targeted for financial and technology professionals in the insurance and financial services industry. During June 6-9, join us as we provide an unparalleled forum for education that will enhance your knowledge, your career potential and the industry.

www.iasa.org