Insurance companies rely on Business Objects for enterprise performance management solutions

(BUSINESS WIRE) - Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ)(Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 - BOB), the world's leading provider of business intelligence solutions, today announced that leading global insurance companies are selecting its enterprise performance management solutions to help manage their growth and performance.

After a record-breaking year, insurers are preparing for increased profitability pressures through enterprise performance management. These companies are turning to driver-based planning and activity-based costing for leading indicators of key performance metrics, to ensure sustained profitability through revenue growth and expense containment.

Insurers globally are turning to Business Objects for innovative business intelligence and performance management applications. Business Objects insurance customers include Amerisure, PICA Group, Arch Insurance Group, Amerihealth Mercy, and EMPLOYERSSM among others.

"We are constantly on the lookout for ways to make our people more effective," said Doug Webb, chief financial officer at PICA Group. "Our Business Objects Planning solution enables our financial managers to spend less time gathering disparate data, and more time on analysis, and that helps our business units ultimately improve performance."

"With our Business Objects solutions, we know we are getting powerful activity-based costing and activity analysis tools to help us truly understand our customer and product profitability," said Jim Shoemaker, senior manager, financial planning and analysis at Amerihealth Mercy. "This enables us to make more informed decisions, thereby giving us a competitive advantage in our business."

With more than 700 insurance customers, including nine of the top 10 global insurance companies and all of the top 10 non-life insurance companies worldwide, Business Objects understands the challenges faced by these organisations.

Leading insurance companies are standardising on business intelligence and enterprise performance management software from Business Objects to innovate their business through:

* Better analysis and understanding of the cost drivers of customer, channel and product profitability.
* Shared services cost analysis and allocation to monitor and improve the performance of service level agreements by line of business.
* Improved operational analysis and productivity in claims management, agent service and customer service resulting in lower operating expenses.
* Integrated and timely financial and operational data to shorten budgeting, planning, and forecasting cycle times and improve actionable decision-making.

Business Objects today also announced it has extended its insurance planning solution to include life and health insurance. "We grew the number of insurance customers, using our enterprise performance management solutions, by over 35% last year," said Pat Saporito, insurance solutions director of the EPM Center of Excellence at Business Objects. "A significant part of this growth was achieved by extending our insurance solutions to the life and health sector. We have helped life and health insurers improve and accelerate their planning, budgeting and reporting through the use of industry and sector-specific planning metrics, reports and performance dashboards." The company's 2006 acquisition of ALG, a leading solution provider with insurance industry expertise across the EPM space, served to help its insurance customers improve performance management. ALG's profitability analysis and activity-based costing identify the key cost drivers for improved driver-based budgeting and planning, as well as prioritising areas for business process improvement.

The company's insurance industry enterprise performance management solutions combined with its market-leading business intelligence and information integration tools help provide Business Objects insurance customers with a competitive edge.

Five hundred insurance industry respondents in the US and Canada cast their vote recently to select Business Objects as winner of the 'Keep insurer informed through analytics' category of the first-ever Insure TOPTech awards.

The selection demonstrates the value and critical importance of analytics in the insurance industry. While data is the lifeblood, analytics makes data actionable, which affects the ability to make sound, timely, and actionable business decisions.

Insurance Networking News www.insurancenetworking.com and Financial Insights www.financialinsights.com, an IDC company, partnered in this jointly produced new awards initiative. The winners were announced at the ACORD LOMA Systems Forum last week in Orlando, Florida. Results can be viewed in a special report at: http://www.financial-insights.com/FI/downloads/InsureTopTech2007 Final.pdf (Due to its length, this URL may need to be copied/pasted into your Internet browser's address field. Remove the extra space if one exists.), which will also be distributed at the IASA Annual Conference held from 4 to 6 June in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

For more information on Business Objects solutions for insurance and other financial services organisations, please visit http://www.businessobjects.com/financial_services/.