14 DAY TRIAL // New self-running demos and business solution documents have been made available via Microsoft's Insurance Value Chain (IVC) initiative. According to the Redmond Company, the updated content addressing insurance customers is designed to provide streamlined application development built to tackle key business problems.
"This hands-on guidance helps insurance architects and developers create service-oriented architectures and deploy pre-integrated software applications around core insurance business processes," said Dan Woodman, technology strategist for the U.S. insurance industry at Microsoft. "The goal of the IVC is to enable innovation, choice and competitive differentiation - without requiring a massive 'rip-and-replace' or expensive consulting engagement."
The MSDN developer network Web site is the source of the downloads and Microsoft revealed that the additional content is expanding on the Insurance Value Chain Architecture Framework (IVCAF) v1.0. "The business solution documents focus on the common workflow areas of new business origination for commercial auto, annuities and policy renewal. Also available are self-running animated demos for these core areas, as well as a white paper discussing both the IVC and Microsoft's technical and architectural agenda for the insurance industry," Microsoft added.
Microsoft's Insurance Value Chain Architecture Framework (IVCAF) v1.0 was introduced at the ACORD LOMA Insurance Systems Forum in 2006. The IVCAF has as main purpose to enable insurance customers to reduce considerably the time and costs associated with the integration of applications for cross-enterprise scenarios.
Microsoft has gathered an impressive list of partners and is building a heterogeneous insurance environment. In this context, insurance customers will be able to tap the resources provided by all Microsoft's partners. "The IVCAF is an industry-standards-based approach that delivers a library of integrations and prescriptive guidance on the development of straight-through processing, enabling workflow across multiple insurance applications - on or off the Microsoft platform," revealed the Redmond Company.