If you're looking to reduce your company's ACORD transformation costs, this might be the thing for you. "Combining ACORD standard with enterprise cloud computing," according to officials of Informatica Corporation, the company is announcing the Informatica Insurance Gateway (News - Alert) for Salesforce CRM. 

 

The product is billed as a tool for "improving" interactions between insurance carriers and their distribution networks via sharing data online. It's used to integrate back office systems to Salesforce CRM and Force.com products.

The gateway uses Informatica's Data Integration Platform to allow volume exchange of data between back office systems and a carrier's Salesforce.com (News - Alert) partner management application, using ACORD standards to ensure that the information can be exchanged, interpreted and used.

Company officials say the product can be used to get "greater visibility into producer data across multiple products and contracts," transforming "data from multiple contracting and licensing applications and administrative systems, including mainframes, into ACORD," as it "aggregates and loads the integrated data into Salesforce CRM Partner Networks in real-time."

 

Among the benefits to this seen by Informatica officials are that "agents can be on-boarded more quickly, have current information on commissions, policies and claims at almost all times, and can use Salesforce CRM to manage leads and opportunities."

 

The product is also touted as having advantages for the carrier, including providing a single view of every producer and agency and a reduction in ACORD transformation costs.

Insurance carrier performance is a good target market for this product, as it's fairly dependent on the ability of agents to retrieve and deliver information on customers, leads, policies and claims stored in the carrier's back office systems and data stores. The tool natively supports ACORD XML.

 

In late December 2008 TMC reported that Kerensen Consulting officials said they partnered with Informatica On Demand to "accelerate Salesforce.com implementation."

Kerensen and Informatica On Demand agreed to join their offer on the Cloud Computing market. With Informatica's on-demand integration application and Kerensen's Salesforce experience, officials of both firms believe they now can offer Salesforce.com customers "a complete package for their CRM needs."