Generali US Branch, the U.S. operations of global P&C insurer Assicurazioni Generali S.p.A., has migrated its commercial auto and liability lines of business to Instec’s Quicksolver Cloud policy administration platform, which is now in production and running on Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud platform.
“The project was a very simple migration for us,” said Mauricio Caneda, CIO for Generali. “All we had to do was run some scripts and backups on our end and send them to them Instec. They pretty much managed the whole thing.” Generali uses straight ISO ratings with no customizations, Caneda said, which simplified the migration from the previous version of Quicksolver to the new cloud-based platform.
Generali is investing heavily in cloud technology as part of its strategy to modernize operational systems, Instec said, and by moving its core policy administration platform to Windows Azure, the insurer has a more dependable operating environment with improved system uptime as well as immediate access to data backups.
“We started considering moving things offsite right after 9/11,” Caneda said. “We did that with our Exchange Server but kept our core systems inhouse. And then Superstorm Sandy struck and the basement of 7 World Trade Center, which is where our office is, was 14 feet underwater. All of downtown Manhattan lost power. That prompted us to aggressively reevaluate all of our solutions and move what we could offsite and into the cloud, and plan for the other applications that weren’t so simple to migrate over.”
Microsoft’s Windows Azure is an open, scalable cloud platform that enables companies to develop, implement and distribute applications, Instec said. Instec’s Quicksolver is a P&C insurance rating and policy administration system that supports multi-state, multi-location, bureau and client-specific policy processing for all 50 states and major commercial lines of business.
“Generali’s successful implementation is evidence that insurers are finding a great deal of value in this approach, which we believe will increase dramatically in use over the next few years,” said Kevin Mason, Instec’s VP of product development and maintenance. “The combination of Quicksolver and the Windows Azure cloud platform has enabled us to deliver an offering that provides Generali a highly reliable environment that emphasize our core value propositions of faster time to market, lower total cost of ownership and reduced risk of implementation.”
When set up through Windows Azure, Instec said the software delivers scalability, cost control and speed of delivery to carriers and MGAs in the commercial market.
“By deploying Quicksolver Cloud in Windows Azure, carriers such as Generali can now take advantage of the cloud’s economics, scalability and reliability. The cost savings and efficiencies insurers are realizing in the cloud are an incredible competitive edge—it’s a game changer,” said Tony Jacob, Microsoft’s managing director for worldwide insurance. “We also see many other insurance carriers now looking at the cloud to provide a path to modernization in core systems, risk and analytics, agent desktops, etc., where traditional approaches may have been ruled out based on costs, timelines and risk.”
