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Information Builders announced two new technology updates at its Summit user conference in Las Vegas Tuesday that will add new reporting applications for the insurance industry as well as expand the companys iWay data integration technology.
Information Builders Inc. is also showcasing version 7 of its flagship WebFocus business intelligence suite, which is expected to ship next month.
The New York-based company announced a partnership with consulting firm BearingPoint Inc. to provide a packaged business intelligence solution for the insurance industry this year, the first of several vertical-industry packaged apps Information Builders is planning.
The new WebFocus-based application, known as the Information Builders Insurance Reporting Foundation (IRF) consists of an insurance data model, an ETL (extraction, transformation and loading) module for scheduled updating of the IRF database, and a suite of parameterized reporting frameworks.
The whole application is provided in a dashboard GUI along with insurance industry-specific key performance indicators.
Insurance is Information Builders largest penetrated vertical, according to company officials. The company is developing solutions for state and local governments—particularly in the homeland security area—and the financial services industry as well, company officials said.
On the integration side, Information Builders iWay Software subsidiary announced iWay 2005 on Tuesday, an application which rounds out the companys integration adapter offerings with an integrated design-time toolkit, a run-time engine built upon an open-transport service bus architecture, and a new business-to-business component called Trading Manager.
The enhancements are collectively known as the iWay Adaptive Framework for SOA (service-oriented architecture) and are designed to better manage Web services integration.
The new technology includes the iWay Adapter Manager, a run-time engine that uses an integrated set of graphical tools to create metadata from target applications, define integration processes, and transform and map messages, then deploy processes as managed Web services, without writing custom integration code.
iWay Adapter Manager controls service interactions among iWay Softwares more than 280 adapters, which cover seven classes of application, data and e-business protocols.
The iWay 2005 release also includes Trading Manager, a GUI environment used by EDI (electronic data interchange) administrators for finding correlations between documents, transactions, trading partners and communication/service channels, and offering real-time performance management of the messages and transactions.
IWay officials said the new product would not replace existing middleware solutions, but was designed to make them more cost-effective to use and easier to implement and manage.