Nov. 4, 2009 (PR Newswire) --
ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 4 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it is donating technology assets including its Insurance Application Architecture (IAA) Business Object/Data Model and the IAA Product Specification Diagram (PSD) Notation to help promote insurance industry standards. These technology assets that are built combining IBM hardware, software and research will be donated to the Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development (ACORD), a leading non-profit standards development organization serving the insurance and financial services industries.
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Today's announcement is building on an effort to encourage collaboration and drive innovation in the insurance industry. The adoption of standardized business processes and models will make it easier for insurers to work with agents, brokers and other data partners.
The overall contribution represents a significant contribution of intellectual property associated with IBM's insurance industry models. The donated models are from IBM's Insurance Application Architecture (IAA), the company's insurance business and IT architecture framework. IAA is continually developed by IBM in collaboration with 100 leading insurance companies around the world, and the IAA model has been licensed by more than 200 insurers worldwide. IAA Business Object/Data Model, coupled with the existing ACORD Information Model, will form the building blocks for the next version of the ACORD Information Model.
"Over the past year, ACORD with previous donations and member participation, created the initial Information Model in an effort to provide an industry-owned model. IBM's donation will allow ACORD to leverage IBM's 20 years of experience in building an insurance industry model to further develop the ACORD Information Model. The consolidation of the two models will be available to the industry participants for future innovation," said John Kellington, Senior Vice President of ACORD.
IAA is part of IBM's Industry Models portfolio, a comprehensive family of data, process and service models that are widely used across industries. Going forward, IBM will continue to work closely with ACORD to align IBM's rich set of IAA models with ACORD's standards portfolio. In addition, implementation guides and supporting tools will be issued by ACORD to foster the adoption and expansion of the Framework.
"The synergy of IAA and ACORD working together to create full, robust, flexible insurance assets will aid the ACORD standards group to leverage an insurance industry blueprint with a full operational payload.
