Prima Solutions Paris, France

Alliance relationship
Prima Solutions provides a standards-based software foundation and reference model to design, develop, deploy, manage, monitor and maintain service-oriented insurance applications.

Prima IBCS™ is a reference insurance model used as a starting point for building a specific enterprise-wide semantic, which is also available through subscription. It is the result of several years of research and development by insurance experts and object oriented specialists. Prima Solutions has described in Unified Modeling Language Version 2 (UML2) over 100 best practice processes and dozens of business service definitions, which are consistently defined with the IBCS classes. This includes more than 1,000 documented classes spanning Life (group and individual), Property and Casualty (car and home) and Reinsurance, as well as new business, underwriting, contract lifecycle management and claims processing. Prima IBCS™ is also packaged with a template-based generation toolset that supports a Model Driven Architecture (MDA) approach and greatly automates the generation of dedicated insurance services based on ILOG JRules.

Prima Repository™ is a unified and extensible software solution for building new process-based multi-tier insurance applications. It is the only integrated suite of components that can be used in total or in part to easily develop, deploy and manage service-oriented architecture (SOA) applications. Prima Repository is built around a central repository to organize services, objects, processes, and rules in a single view, thereby managing their versions, documentations, metadata and ensuring consistency of the SOA applications. Prima Repository embeds a complete service orchestration and business process management suite and leverages ILOG JViews and ILOG JRules.

In 2006, ILOG acquired a 33-percent ownership interest in Prima Solutions to strengthen the partnership between the two companies, the success of Prima Solutions, and to support the deeper penetration of ILOG's business rule management systems (BRMS) in the insurance industry.

ILOG contribution
ILOG BRMS helps insurance carriers build flexible applications that enhance their operational efficiency, optimize processes and improve customer retention and acquisition. ILOG BRMS goes beyond basic automation with decisioning capabilities throughout core processes and across lines of business. Carriers rely on ILOG BRMS to enhance their core processes in areas such as policy administration, underwriting, rating, claims processing, billing and payment, distribution, asset management and annuities.

Results
Prima Solutions' domain and technical expertise in the insurance space is captured in Prima IBCS, an extensive insurance object model that makes it easier and faster for insurance carriers to build underwriting and claims processing applications. The model is designed to reduce the costs and risks associated with the deployment of a distributed SOA through an incremental approach.

Legacy systems and independent projects often use different data models (with different formats, possible values and meanings). Building processes and services across systems, as promoted by an SOA approach, requires data transformation steps that are costly to build and maintain unless a common pivotal enterprise model is defined. Defining this common semantic is one of the main difficulties insurers face in deployment of large-scale SOAs. Prima IBCS offers the capability to start an SOA transformation from a fully documented and adaptable reference model, providing a clear start that reduces costs, risks, and time to deployment.

Technical Background
Prima Solutions was among the first companies to develop insurance platforms that leverage SOA. The company's IBCS reference object model provides an incremental development approach that reduces costs and risks in building underwriting and claims applications.

Built by insurance experts and object-oriented specialists, IBCS encompasses more than 100 core processes and 1,000 classes, spanning policy domains for life, reinsurance, and property and casualty. Prima lists several leading insurance companies among its customers, including CNP Assurances, Generali, Safeco, Swiss Life and Groupama/Gan.

Prima Solutions is a member of ACORD, a global nonprofit association that develops standards used by the insurance industry and related financial services. The association promotes the use of a common XML vocabulary for sharing dates and ensuring system interoperability.

Prima Solutions and ILOG are members of Object Management Group (OMG) an open membership, not-for-profit consortium that produces and maintains computer industry specifications for interoperable enterprise applications.

For more information or for a demonstration of these capabilities, contact ILOG or Hugues Delannoy of Prima Solutions.