As part of our research, Celent has been covering a large variety of vendors active in the insurance space. Over the past 6 months we have published a few reports profiling specific core insurance system vendors in different application domains such as policy administration, claims, underwriting and quote and illustration. Based on our continuous screening of the market we have a pretty good understanding of this market: In Europe, the Middle East, and Africa we have noticed that the market is highly fragmented and we think that a concentration phase will decrease the number of market participants over the next decade. Mergers and acquisitions activities have already started with some interesting strategic moves that happened over the past 5 years such as the acquisition of Duck Creek by Accenture, IDIT and FIS Software by Sapiens and the merger between FJA and COR AG. More recently we have seen software integrators or more generally what Celent calls IT services vendors getting more active on the M&A front with for instance MphasiS purchasing Wyde a few years ago. As we are about to kick off the update of our IT Services vendor reports from 2010 (for more information about these reports you can click on the following links: IT Services Vendors Solutions Spectrum: North American Version, 2010 and IT Services Vendors Solutions Spectrum: EMEA Version, 2010), we already have noticed that some IT services firms are getting very aggressive on the market. A good example is without any doubts Sopra who has had an acquisition fever over the past 3 years with the recent acquisition of Steria announced this week. We find the recent M&A developments in the core insurance system vendor area as well as the IT services vendor industry interesting. We think it demonstrates that IT in financial services and more specifically in insurance attracts interests from investors, being existing players or new ones. In this fast changing environment, we are looking forward to get a deep dive in the IT services vendor landscape in order to provide the latest about this market to our insurance subscription clients. Stay tuned!