In China, Taikang Life Insurance & IBM Plan Joint Development of "Smart" Databases21 March 2006
Today, IBM and Taikang Life InsuranceCompany, Ltd., China's fifth largest life insurance company, announced acollaborative research project to help solve some of the greatestchallenges facing the worldwide insurance industry today.
Taikang Life will utilize the worldwide talent and resources from IBM'sChina, Almaden and Tokyo labs to improve the performance and usability ofbusiness intelligence applications embedded in the insurer's federateddatabase systems. The goal of the project is to enable the use ofinformation as a service by enhancing their platform for more efficientsharing of information, improved operational efficiency and as a result,better customer service.
Taikang Life is undertaking this project to gain a competitive advantagethrough improving the efficiency of its insurance processes while reducingcosts. The project will leverage Taikang Life's service orientedarchitecture (SOA) that ties disparate data together, providing a clear,real time view of customer information.
"We have chosen IBM as our technology partner because we know that tooutpace fierce competition in China we need to manage our information as anasset and find ways to turn information into innovative services thatreturn value for our customers while improving our bottom line," saidTaikang Life's CFO and Chief Actuary, Yin Qimin.
The project is expected to help Taikang Life enable access of data acrossvarious platforms, warehouses, and databases by utilizing IBM's informationmanagement research and software including the IBM Insurance InformationWarehouse lab.
Some of the challenges common across the insurance industry the projectwill address include: enhancing the insurance underwriting process;enabling a single view of the customer; providing greater intelligence anddata about individual customer needs for upselling and cross sellingpurposes; improving the ability to capture, track and display performanceinformation for management; and improving the database-intensive clearanceprocess during which databases from multiple branches need to be searched.
"This is a real life example of IBM working with clients to generate newideas and innovative solutions that deliver business value," said NelsonMattos, vice president Information and Interaction, IBM Research. "Theproject allows our researchers to utilize the global industry assets wehave like the Insurance Application Architecture and Insurance InformationWarehouse and further refine them for future engagements."
Taikang Life currently uses IBM WebSphere Information Integrator, IBM DB2Universal Database and IBM Informix Dynamic database systems allowing themto federate data into a central repository providing easy access tocorporate and customer-related data. The company also uses IBM eServer®iSeries and IBM eServer® pSeries servers.
About Taikang Life
Founded in 1996 with headquarters in Beijing, Taikang has rapidly become amajor player in the Chinese domestic insurance market. The company, withsome 8,000 employees and more than 3.5 million customers, sells its life,annuity and health policies to consumers through 120 branch officesthroughout China, and a network of over 150,000 independent agents.
About IBM
IBM is the world's largest information technology company, with 80 years ofleadership in helping businesses innovate. Drawing on resources from acrossIBM and key Business Partners, IBM offers a wide range of services,solutions and technologies that enable customers, large and small, to takefull advantage of the new era of e-business.
For additional information contact:
Steven TomascoIBM Media Relations914-945-1655stomasc@us.ibm.com
SOURCE: IBM
Source: marketwire
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