Solutions

May 01, 2009, 2:13 p.m. EDT 13 Min Read

MOBILE TECHNOLOGY FOR RISK INSPECTION

Boston-based Karen Clark & Co. has launched RiskRover, a new software product that helps insurance companies collect and analyze data from property inspections.

The RiskRover software is designed for field inspectors and loss control specialists, and intended to be installed on a "smartphone" or similar handheld device for use in the field. With RiskRover, an inspector can capture detailed property attributes using customizable data fields, photos and videos with tags, and handwritten notes and sketches. The application, which can be deployed on devices that use the Windows mobile operating system, also can record the address and coordinates of the property using the device's GPS system.

The information collected during the inspection is instantly transmitted to an online database for immediate accessibility. The included RiskInsight interface allows underwriters and other staff to easily query and view the data and photos captured by RiskRover. The company says the application helps insurers obtain better information about the properties they insure, while increasing the efficiency of inspectors and underwriters. By capturing inspection data electronically, RiskRover relieves inspectors of the additional step of transcribing observations into a report.

STOREDIQ ENHANCES E-DISCOVERY PRODUCT

Austin, Texas-based StoredIQ Inc., a provider of information management and e-discovery technologies, has expanded its eDiscovery solution to fully support Symantec Enterprise Vault as a recognized data source during the legal discovery process.

StoredIQ offers Enterprise Vault customers access to a broad set of data sources in addition to an e-mail archive, and it automates the previously manual tasks of collecting, processing and preparing responsive data for litigation review. Using StoredIQ technology for topology mapping, classification and search, companies can rapidly target, collect, preserve and process potentially relevant documents with a legally defensible method, reducing legal risk while saving collection, preservation and processing expense, the company says.

"StoredIQ can quickly and defensibly identify all responsive data across the entire enterprise where it natively resides, including within Enterprise Vault," says Christine Taylor, analyst with Hopkinton, Mass.-based Taneja Group.

CSC USES VIRTUALIZATION TO BETTER BPO OFFERING

Falls Church, Va.-based Computer Sciences Corp. (CSC) is utilizing desktop virtualization solutions from Santa Clara, Calif.-based Sun Microsystems Inc. at three CSC financial services business process outsourcing (BPO) locations.

Focusing on installations in Jacksonville, Ill., Nashville, Tenn., and Irving, Texas, the upgrades are part of a broader CSC initiative to enhance data security, reduce costs and save energy.

In 2009, CSC intends to replace more than 2,500 desktop computers at 17 U.S. operations serving clients in life and annuity insurance, property/casualty insurance and banking.

The company says the Sun Ray-based solution will enable CSC financial services clients to realize the benefits of a virtualized environment, by allowing administrators to host and centrally manage virtual desktop machines on servers in the data center, while giving end users a full desktop computer experience from a thin-client center desktops.

"CSC's investment in technological advancements such as the Sun Ray devices is one of the reasons we have relied on CSC for business process outsourcing for so many years," says Bonnie Wasgatt, SVP, Swiss Re.

TOTAL REWARDS SOFTWARE LAUNCHES AGENCY EDITION

Total Rewards Software Inc., a Rocklin, Calif.-based provider of on-demand total compensation statement software, has created a partnership program called the Agency Edition. Designed specifically for brokers and consultants, it provides a private-label version of the software, up to 70% commission or discounted pricing, sales and marketing support, dedicated implementation support and business intelligence modules as part of the partnership.

"This year, most employers are expecting no salary increases or bonus payouts," says Char Ruppel, VP of business development at Total Rewards Software. "Yet the value of their benefits program still represents nearly 30% of their employees total compensation. Most employees have no idea of the investment their employers are making on their behalf. The challenge then becomes how to promote total compensation to offset these cash compensation freezes with little or no HR budget."

Broker partners can produce several print statement formats as well as secure, password-protected online statements at the same time, and for the same cost using the private-label software. Business intelligence modules provide tracking, measuring and reporting statistics.

CHORDIANT RELEASES VERSION 6.2 OF CDM

Chordiant Software Inc., a Cupertino, Calif.-based provider of customer experience software and services, announced general availability of its flagship Chordiant Decision Management (CDM), version 6.2.

With this release, users can simulate and test the potential business impact of customer strategies before putting them into production, and then monitor and control their performance companywide or in any part of the business in real-time, the company says.

CDM 6.2 is designed to provide support for multi-byte character languages. For companies who require support for languages such as Chinese and Japanese, CDM 6.2 can receive input from multi-byte character data sources to support Next-Best-Action recommendations.

CDM 6.2 offers a business simulation module called Chordiant Cx Visual Business Director (Cx VBD), the company says. Cx VBD is designed to enable companies to monitor enterprisewide performance of customer experience strategies, simulate changes to those strategies on actual data and implement those changes in real-time.

CDM 6.2 is an upgraded strategy director module that delivers design-time simulation, enabling users to test and analyze the business impact of a new customer strategy on a defined user sample as the strategy is being developed, Choridiant says. The user will see graphed distributions of how the strategy will impact actions, offers, expected costs, revenues, profits, etc.

UTOPY'S SPEECH ANALYTICS RECEIVES NEW PATENT

UTOPY Inc., a San Francisco provider of customer intelligence and performance optimization solutions powered by speech analytics, announced it has been granted U.S. Patent No. 7,487,094 titled "System and method of call classification with context modeling based on composite words," by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The patent covers the system and methods of classifying a human-to-human telephone conversation, such as in insurance call centers, into predefined categories of interest.

"This patent, in addition to several other pending patents, is a reflection of our investment and commitment to developing innovative technology that solves today's critical problems," says Yochai Konig, co-founder and CTO of UTOPY. Konig adds that UTOPY's phrase-based contextual speech recognition-cum-understanding approach has been yielding tremendous business value by analyzing tens of millions of calls in more a dozen languages across the globe with accuracy.

Organizations around the globe are using this technology to analyze the performance of each agent, team and contact center within an organization across several dimensions, including call reason, customer satisfaction and issue resolution, UTOPY says.

Actionable recommendations and real-time alerts tied to key performance indicators can be delivered to the desktop of each agent, supervisor, analyst and manager on a weekly and daily basis. This enables proactive learning, targeted coaching and enhanced decision-making that results in higher agent productivity, supervisor effectiveness and contact center performance optimization.

INITIATE, ACCENX TO OFFER SOFTWARE-AS-A-SERVICE

Initiate Systems Inc., a Chicago-based provider of master data management and interoperable health solutions, and Accenx Technologies Inc., an Irvine, Calif.-based provider of health information exchange solutions, report that Accenx will offer fully managed, remote hosting of Initiate Patient for health care customers. The first customer for the joint solution is OhioHealth, a family of 15 hospitals, 20 health and surgery centers, home-health providers, medical equipment and health service suppliers throughout a 46-county area.

Initiate Patient is used as an enterprise master person index for health care organizations and government agencies to transform critical business processes by delivering higher quality information to them. Initiate Patient delivers a comprehensive, single view of patients to end-users in real time at the point of care.

"The combination of Initiate's interoperable health software and Accenx's core competency of delivering solutions over the Internet provides hospitals and health systems with a unique interoperable health deployment alternative," says Sean Cassidy, VP, products for Initiate Systems. "Hosting Initiate Patient through Accenx offers customers faster time to value, and reduced total cost of ownership."

JACK HENRY ANNOUNCES VIRTUALIZATION SUPPORT

Jack Henry & Associates Inc., a Monnett, Mo.-based provider of integrated technology solutions and data processing services for financial institutions, announced its commitment to support its growing number of client/server-based complementary products with server virtualization.

Server virtualization distributes computing power by consolidating multiple independent server environments that consist of operating systems and application software on a smaller number of servers, which can generate significant cost and time saving benefits for Jack Henry & Associates' clients.

Jack Henry & Associates is certifying its complementary products, and also is currently supporting VMware ESX solutions with plans to support Microsoft's Hyper-V solutions in the future.

With virtualization technologies now maturing, Jack Henry & Associates expects its customers will realize tangible benefits from server virtualization. Reducing the number of physical servers lessens hardware costs and ongoing energy requirements, reduces floor space and cooling requirements, expedites the deployment of new business solutions, enhances disaster recovery and business continuity, and can solve a number of inherent IT-related operational issues.

MIMOSA SYSTEMS NOW SUPPORTS MICROSOFT OFFICE SHAREPOINT SERVER 2007

Mimosa Systems, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based provider of e-mail and file archiving solutions, reports that it has extended Mimosa NearPoint. The enterprise e-mail and file archiving solution now offers complete content archiving, data protection and e-discovery support for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, according to the company.

Mimosa NearPoint for Office SharePoint Server 2007 is designed to provide the industry with an extensive content archive solution that delivers information management capabilities to address requirements for storage optimization, recovery, information access and e-discovery in a single offering.

The widespread adoption and proliferation of Office SharePoint Server 2007 is creating a growing challenge for enterprises trying to protect this content, control storage costs, and preserve and search across repositories in the face of stringent discovery requirements.

Mimosa NearPoint for Office SharePoint Server 2007 transforms data from multiple repositories into a comprehensive, intelligent archive, and streamlines information management and discovery processes while substantially lowering storage costs, the company says.

FORECLOSURE MONITORING SERVICES AVAILABLE

CDS Business Mapping LLC, Boston, a provider of online hazard mapping, reports that it has added foreclosure monitoring to its RiskMeter Online service. Users now can submit an Excel file, and the RiskMeter Online will flag policies in the foreclosure process, the company says.

Many insurers are starting to realize that once a property enters a state of foreclosure, the potential for losses can increase due to vandalism, water damage, arson, etc. Insurers that are able to identify policies in the foreclosure process will be able to take proactive steps to minimize losses by: requesting a property inspection; determining occupancy status (occupied, vacant); revising coverage; increasing premiums; and issuing a cancellation or non-renewal notice.

"With unemployment figures rising, home values depreciating, fewer people qualifying for refinancing and more mortgages under water, homeowners are either walking away or finding it tougher to make their mortgage payments," says Dan Munson, founder, RiskMeter Online. "Insurers that can identify policies in the early stages of the foreclosure process will at least be able to take proactive steps to minimize any losses."

SAS FRAUD FRAMEWORK

SAS, Cary, N.C., has released SAS Fraud Framework, which includes components intended to support detection and alert generation, alert management and case management, and a new SAS Social Network Analysis solution. Industry-specific business rules, models and other capabilities, the company says, will help banking, insurance and government organizations prevent and detect various types of fraudulent activities, and manage efforts against them.

Designed to provide insurers with a comprehensive view of fraud risk, the SAS Fraud Framework includes detection and alert, and case management to help reduce loss and prosecute fraudsters. By preventing both line-of-business fraud and cross-channel enterprise fraud, organizations can use the framework to help increase fraud detection rates, reduce false positives and streamline investigative resources, SAS says. At the core of the framework is a profiling engine that scores individuals, accounts, products and networks based on rules, fraud scores and links to known fraudsters. Consolidating alerts from multiple systems provides an enterprise view of fraud exposure and risk.

The SAS Social Network Analysis software is designed to help investigators detect and prevent fraud by going beyond transaction and customer views to analyze all related activities and relationships within a network, such as shared address, telephone numbers, employment, account ownership and other key transactional data. The software provides an interface designed to enable fast access to customer details and related parties and networks, resulting in quicker case assessments and better dossier production.

NMVTIS COMPLIANCE REPORTING SERVICE

ISO ClaimSearch, a comprehensive claims information system intended for the property/casualty insurance industry, announced the development of a new regulatory compliance service: the ISO ClaimSearch NMVTIS Compliance Reporting Service.

Since insurers, salvage companies, junkyards, recyclers and shredders are now required to report total-loss and salvage information to the National Motor Vehicle Title Information Service (NMVTIS), ISO ClaimSearch is designed to enable insurers, salvage companies and others to report the required data to ISO ClaimSearch to comply with the mandate.

ISO, Jersey City, N.J., says the product will include the NMVTIS reporting as part of its regular service for insurer participants in the auto segment of ISO ClaimSearch at no additional charge. Non-insurer companies also can report through ISO ClaimSearch for a fee.

By reporting to NMVTIS through ISO ClaimSearch, insurers can:

* Save on programming costs or the cost of using an outside vendor;

* Streamline workflow because they already report data to ISO ClaimSearch;

* Be assured of compliance with the NMVTIS regulations.

NMVTIS was established by the Anti-Car Theft Act of 1992 to assist in preventing the introduction or reintroduction of stolen and salvaged motor vehicles into interstate commerce. NMVTIS provides authorized recipients with instant and reliable access to motor vehicle titling information maintained by the states, and is operated under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Justice.