Informatica, a provider of data integration software, announcesthe availability of two data integration capabilities for theinsurance industry: XMap and HParser. Working alone or in concert,the improved capabilities enable insurers to address theopportunities and challenges around ACORD insurancestandards andbig data.

In a recent customer-hosted benchmark, XMap and HParser wereused in the processing of three gigabytes of proprietary insuranceXML on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). The entire XMLprocessing took only 50 seconds on a 16-node Amazon EMRcluster.

"Eighty percent of ACORD data adheres to XMLstandards andanything that eases and speeds XML mappings and transformations canhave a positive impact on insurance operations," said Ash Kulkarni,senior vice president and general manager, B2B and messaging forInformatica. "The XMap and HParser capabilities in Informatica 9.5are setting thestandard in terms of solutions needed for insuranceIT organizations—the former for how it enables the most complexACORD XML schemas to be mapped with ease and the latter for how itefficiently executes XML transformations natively on Hadoopclusters for cost-effective, high-performance processing of biginsurance data."

Together, XMap and HParser empower insurance organizations tomaximize their return on big data by lowering the costs of mapping,transforming and processing big insurance data. In addition, thisoffering is increasing the value of the data through improvedbusiness access to information, more efficient data-driven businessprocesses and the ability to engage in big data analytics.

Embeddable in any enterprise architecture,Informatica XMap is designed to handle the complexities of ACORDXML schemas. With XMap, users leverage a visual drag-and-dropdesign environment to:

• Visually create XML mappings that can be interactively iteratedandenhanced over time.
• Easily map the most intricate LAH, PCS and RLC schemas, withbuilt-in debugging.
• Usestandard XPath v2 language to express mapping logic,enabling reuse of existing XPath skills and the wealth of XPathmaterials available online.

Informatica HParser 9.5 is the latest version and the first datatransformation environment optimized for Hadoop. With HParser 9.5,Informatica introduces the ability to:

• Execute logic natively on Hadoop to take advantage of Hadoopperformance      for avariety of formats, including ACORD XML, DTCC, AL3 and EDI.
• Run on Amazon EMR in the cloud to reduce start-up costs,provisioning only the Hadoop nodes required for a specificjob.

As with XMap, HParser users leverage a visual design studio forcreating custom transformations and executions, and can access aportfolio of building block for creating complextransformations.

HParser is designed to be distributed across multiple nodes ofan Hadoop cluster, where HParser transformation read data from theHadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and deliver resultstransparently to MapReduce logic.