In late 1999, Vittorio Severino made the switch from the securities side of financial services to the insurance side, joining Hartford Life, one of the worlds largest life and annuity companies, as its chief information officer. It was a very easy decision for me, Severino says. Besides being a leader in its field and rapidly growing, I like the kind of products were dealing with. Instead of such things as derivatives, insurance and annuities are things the average person can understand. For an engineer, its more real and more tangible.

His securities background has been a help in Hartford Lifes groundbreaking hedging project, which recently went live with rave reviews from security analysts. Some of the insurers more popular annuities have features that provide the upside potential of mutual funds without the downside risk of losing capital, protecting that risk with insurance that typically was reinsured. After 9/11, the reinsurance market for those kinds of risks dried up, he explains, and we were faced with dropping a popular and important part of our product. Hartford Life took the unusual step of hedging that risk using the capital markets, something that had never been done by an insurer before.

It requires a lot of computing power. Were doing complex calculations, simulating market behavior, and even simulating customer behavior. Those kinds of calculations are not new to securities firms, but they are to the insurance industry, says Severino. He asserts the day that system went live it had four times the computing power of the next-largest system that Hartford Life had. IBM mainframes? Not hardly. We strung together 64 Intel 3 gigahertz processors in commodity boxes, using mostly proprietary software we wrote ourselves. By the end of 2004, well probably be at one terahertz of computing power.