New challenges for enterprise architects

As the technology infrastructures within insurers become increasingly complex, a greater onus will fall on the shoulders of enterprise architects, a new report from Boston-based Celent finds, says Insurance Networking News.

The report, 'The labours of Hercules: the challenges facing insurance enterprise architects', says the issue requires a deeper melding of IT and the underlying business processes.

"IT change is arriving at the gates of the insurer at an ever-increasing rate," notes Craig Beattie, analyst with Celent's insurance group and author of the report. "Staff are now more knowledgeable about technology than ever before. How (or if) the IT function chooses to allow new technology, it must be in line with the insurer's overall objectives."

Etisalat Sri Lanka, one of Sri Lanka's first cellular networks, has adopted Red Hat's enterprise virtualisation solution for its IT infrastructure, states Yahoo Finance.

Etisalat, which previously maintained a heterogeneous IT infrastructure, says its IT team was challenged with finding new hardware to address the growth within short deadlines. The network operator therefore chose to implement the virtualisation solution for its data centre.

“With Red Hat Enterprise Virtualisation, Etisalat Sri Lanka was able to reduce its previous 40 servers down to just six servers, while hosting the same extensive amount of data,” says Hemesh Fernando, senior manager, marketing, visual computing systems.

Research consultancy Gartner says software-as-a-service (SaaS) will have a role in the future of IT, and organisations should assess software needs in light of the current promises of the SaaS platform, reports PRWire.

From a market perspective, SaaS occurs in content, collaboration, communication and customer relationship markets, representing 65% of the global enterprise applications software market in 2009.

“In 2009, SaaS represented 3.4% of total spending on enterprise applications, up from 2008 at 2.8%,” says David Cearley, VP at Gartner. Gartner predicts the global enterprise applications software market will reach $8.8 billion in 2010.