Detailed Profiles and Comparisons of 24 Commercial Lines Systems.

Since 2003, the landscape has changed significantly for P/C policy administration systems. First year TCO has dropped significantly in lockstep with a major influx of newer technologies such as .NET, Java, SOA, Web services, and ACORD XML. Implementation times have grown shorter as vendors make use of new technologies and their own improved experience levels. A number of vendors have cropped up in the last few years that have survived and even thrived. The majority of solutions are considerably better today at what they do today than they were two years ago.

"Quite simply, its a great time for P/C carriers to be considering a new PAS as features critical to ROI such as CRM and data miningbecome relatively standard features in these systems, even as prices drop, implementations become quicker, and vendor options become more plentiful," comments Chad Hersh, a senior analyst in Celents insurance group, and lead author of the report.

Celents new report is designed to help insurers understand this marketplace. The report contains detailed profiles of 24 commercial lines policy administration systems and limited profiles of 8 additional systems. The report also uses Celents new ABCD Vendor View, which is a standard representation of a vendor marketplace designed to show at a glance the relative positions of each vendor in four categories: Advanced technology, Breadth of functionality, Customer base, and Depth of client services. Unlike a simple "four-quadrant" map, solutions in the upper right are not necessarily the best solutionsin an area as complex and idiosyncratic as policy admin, there is no one "best" for all cases. Insurers should consider which factors in breadth, technology, experience, and client service are most important to them, and use the profiles and comparative tables in this report to generate their own shortlists. Only fully-profiled vendors are included in the ABCD Vendor View.

The 24 vendors with full profiles are: Allenbrook, AQS, AscendantOne, CGI (INSideOUT), Computer Sciences Corporation (POINT IN), Delphi Technology, Duck Creek Technologies, ePolicy Solutions, Fiserv Insurance Solutions (The Specialty System), Garvin-Allen, Infinity Systems Consulting, INSTEC, Insurance Data Processing, Insuresoft, Insurity, OneShield, P and C Insurance Systems, PCMS, Sapiens Americas, SunGard Sherwood Systems (FrontTier), Systems Task Group, Tata Consultancy Services, The Innovation Group, and Tritech Financial Systems.

Other vendors included in the report with limited profiles include Accenture, CGI (GIOS), Fiserv (PolicyStar), CSC (Exceed), Steel Card, Guidewire, InsureWorx (formerly Taliant), and Sirius.

The report is 111 pages long and contains multiple figures and tables. A table of contents is available here.

of Celent Communications' Property/Casualty Insurance research service can download the report electronically by clicking on the icon to the left. Non-members should contact info@celent.com for more information.