IBM Debuts Grid Computing Offering for Life Insurance Industry

IBM Debuts Grid Computing Offering for Life Insurance Industry

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new grid computing offering to help life insurance clients significantly decrease the time needed to run complex insurance model scenarios. Called IBM Grid and Grow for Actuarial Analysis, the offering combines IBM and IBM business partner and ISV technologies to help insurance clients improve financial risk and capital management, give a faster time to market with new products and gain a competitive advantage. At the heart of the offering is IBM’s BladeCenter systems to power the grid.

Actuaries — basically risk mathematicians for the insurance industry — often perform calculations with simple personal computers or with basic, manually provisioned, distributed processing environments. The time and efficiency lost through these conventional methods costs the insurance industry millions of dollars a year. Using the IBM actuarial solution, actuaries receive results much quicker making it possible for them to run more calculations and tune their models to improve accuracy. The ability to model more accurate, complex financial scenarios is key in gaining a competitive edge. It also helps meet regulatory compliance and ever increasing reporting demands.

“With grid computing, infrastructures are faster and more resilient, automatically circumventing hardware failures or capacity issues to ensure complex queries complete in an accelerated fashion,” said Ken King, vice president, Grid Computing, IBM. “For insurance companies, as with almost any business, the ability to understand the complex and ever-changing balance between risk and reward in a timely manner is crucial to success. Grid computing can do weeks of work in mere hours and the time saved can make a real difference in the marketplace.”

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