REDWOOD CITY, Calif., May 18, 2009 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Combining ACORD standard with enterprise cloud computing, Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA) the leading independent provider of data integration software and services, today announced customer success with the Informatica Insurance Gateway for Salesforce CRM. The solution improves interactions between insurance carriers and their distribution networks by enabling the sharing of trusted real-time data via the web. The solution builds upon the joint success Informatica and salesforce.com have garnered with customers, as more than a dozen carriers including AAA, Florida Family, and Hagerty are already using Informatica to integrate back office systems to Salesforce CRM and Force.com solutions.
The Informatica Insurance Gateway for Salesforce CRM solution leverages Informatica's market-leading Data Integration Platform to enable lower-cost, higher volume exchange of data between back office systems and a carrier's salesforce.com partner management application, while leveraging ACORD standards to ensure that the information can be efficiently exchanged, easily interpreted and readily used. Using Informatica, customers have been able to reduce ACORD transformation costs by 50% or more.
One joint Informatica-salesforce.com customer, a wholesaler of insurance and other financial products to third-party agents, leverages the solution to achieve visibility into producer data across multiple products and contracts. Averaging more than 100,000 transactions per day, the solution transforms data from multiple contracting and licensing applications and administrative systems, including mainframes, into ACORD, aggregates and loads the integrated data into Salesforce CRM Partner Networks in real-time. Among the benefits of the solution are that agents can be on-boarded more quickly, have current information on commissions, policies and claims at almost all times, and can leverage Salesforce CRM to manage leads and opportunities. Advantages to the carrier include having a single view of every producer and agency and a reduction in ACORD transformation costs.
"By supporting the ACORD standard, Informatica and salesforce.com are driving insurance carrier success with cloud computing," said Renny Monaghan, vice president, Industry Solutions, salesforce.com. "Salesforce.com's partner relationship management application, built on the company's real-time cloud infrastructure, enables carriers to drive more business through their agent networks. Using Informatica to integrate Salesforce CRM removes infrastructure barriers to data exchange and enforces ACORD standards so that carriers can share data with partners in real-time and at a lower cost."
Insurance carrier performance is increasingly dependent on the ability of agents to retrieve and deliver vital information on customers, leads, policies and claims that is stored in the carrier's back office systems and data stores. The Informatica solution integrates data bi-directionally between carriers and their agents, with support for industry standards, including ACORD. Using the Informatica data integration platform, data is accessed from almost any backend system, packaged application or legacy data source, and validated and transformed to comply with the ACORD-based data internal data model as an integral part of the cloud-based data collection and distribution process.
"ACORD is clearly the future of insurance industry information sharing. The Informatica Insurance Gateway for Salesforce CRM solution can reduce the cost of bringing data in ACORD format to agents by as much as 50 percent and accelerate access to meaningful data by sharing information in the cloud," said Girish Pancha, general manager, Data Integration, Informatica. "Informatica and salesforce.com both have a large customer base in the insurance sector, and these customers are able to leverage their existing investments in Informatica and salesforce.com's cloud computing infrastructure and extend their value through the use of the new gateway solution. Our goal is to help our customers to stay current with industry requirements and drive efficiency by enabling the adoption of and continued compliance with standards."
Functionally, the Informatica solution enables a common data model based on ACORD standards across enterprise data sources. The solution natively supports ACORD XML and enables customers to easily adapt to new ACORD versions as they emerge. The solution also supports proprietary ACORD implementations and legacy insurance formats including AL3 in their various versions. Leveraging the Informatica Data Integration Platform, the solution is optimized to support large ACORD structures and large data sets for superior performance, and is highly scalable to keep pace with expanding distribution channels.
For information about the Informatica Insurance Gateway for Salesforce CRM solution please contact Informatica. For more information on Informatica's integration solutions for Salesforce CRM available on the Force.com AppExchange visit www.salesforce.com/appexchange.
About Informatica
Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq:INFA) is the leading independent provider of enterprise data integration software and services. With Informatica, organizations can gain greater business value by integrating all their information assets from across the enterprise. More than 3,600 companies worldwide rely on Informatica to reduce the cost and expedite the time to address data integration needs of varying complexity and scale. For more information, please visit www.informatica.com.
Note: Informatica is a registered trademark of Informatica Corporation in the United States and in jurisdictions throughout the world. All other company and product names may be trade names or trademarks of their respective owners.