Remember the old Etch A Sketch toy that allowed you to “draw” things on a screen by turning dials either vertically or horizontally? Making a choice about which dial to turn is a decision many insurance carriers are facing today when they contemplate which way to proceed with business intelligence (BI) technology. Should they go vertical with an industry-specific tool? Or horizontal with a tool that crosses industry boundaries?

Today's BI software market is split between these two types of products, explains Matt Josefowicz, group manager of the insurance practice at Celent. “It depends what the task is and what people are looking for,” he says. “There are some insurance-specific data warehouses that have some reporting tools with them, but a lot of BI work–reporting, data analysis–is done with cross-industry tools.”

The cross-industry products tend to have a set of verticalized technology the vendors can give to their insurer clients, Josefowicz indicates, even though it's essentially a cross-industry platform. “The insurance-specific tools tend to be less in the reporting end and more in the repository end because those [repository tasks] imply a need for a specific data model,” he says.

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