Insurers focus on BI, private cloud

As the Asia-Pacific region experiences post-recession growth, insurance firms will increase their IT budgets in the year ahead, focusing on private cloud and business intelligence (BI), a new Ovum survey has found, reports ZDNet.

Barry Rabkin, insurance technology principal analyst at Ovum, reported that Asia is currently in a 'growth mode'.

“Although Asia-Pacific insurers are struggling with having more insurance business operating systems than they want, they are planning to increase IT budgets in 2012,” he said.

Ovum interviewed a total of 49 companies from Australia, New Zealand, China, India, Hong Kong, Korea, and Taiwan between March and May this year. The insurance industry segments surveyed included non-life insurers, life insurers and multi-line insurers.

More than half (53%) of the respondents polled said they were going to increase IT budgets for the 2011-2012 period, which is a 6% increase on the 2010-2011 period, the analyst firm said.

According to ComputerWorld, the study found that insurers are also increasingly leveraging BI tools to target customer retention. Some 86% rated this as the most important driver for BI usage.

Compared to their counterparts in the US as well as Europe, Middle East and Africa, Asia-Pacific insurers are more proactively opting for service-oriented architecture, software-as-a-service, and rich Internet applications.