Cindy Saccocia, director, U.S. Insurance Industry Solutions, Microsoft
There's no doubt the insurance industry still faces difficult challenges, even as the economy begins to improve. Insurers today are concerned with market risk, increased regulation, declining premiums, and the ever-present need to cut costs. Managing an insurance company through difficult times is nothing new for insurers and it should not impede their strategy to invest in the future.
The future is cloud computing and it is one of the most compelling transformations taking place in the industry right now, transforming insurers' back offices for the first time. In addition to lowering costs and providing the means to scale computing resources up or down depending on demand, the cloud relieves customers from having to focus on something that isn't their core competency. Many of our insurance customers view this as a way to shift their IT R&D to critical business initiatives and applications by letting commodity-based services such as e-mail, migrate to the cloud.
Top-tier insurers will continue to advance their services, broaden their product offerings, lessen the number of manual processes, and improve the accuracy in the information reported. In the future, we expect that our cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and platforms, will catalyze the entire insurance ecosystem–vendors, developers and insurers' IT staff–to quickly develop and deploy on-demand line of business applications to accomplish those goals.
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