Sri Lanka's life insurance penetration is estimated 9.7 per cent.

After starting in 2005, the firm had made pre-tax profits of 14.9 million rupees in the second year and 53.2 million rupees in the second year.

In 2007 general insurance premiums were 414 million rupees, Alles said.

"Currently we only deal in corporate business, especially with the banks," she says.

"Most of our premium incomes are from project insurance, high value properties and large scale infrastructure insurance."

The firm had insured the Arugam Bay bridge project, the Colombo-Matara highway project, Hyatt Residencies and the World Trade Centre Building.

In the life business, Allianz is offering retirement plans, children's politics, group life for corporate clients and decreasing term assurance cover for mortgage payments.

The company says it is well prepared for competition in the local market.

"Germany - population wise - is four times bigger than Sri Lanka, but we have 115 life insurance companies," says Heinz Dollberg, head of Asia Pacific operations of Allianz

"So we do not fear the competition at all."

He says despite the financial crisis, the firm's global general insurance business has grown 32 per cent and life 10 per cent in the first nine months 2008.

In 2008, the world's largest insurance company American International Group (AIG) of the United States was bailed out with a US$40 billion cash infusion by the Federal Reserve.

Dollberg says China and India are among the core countries and the firm aims at being among the top five in markets that they operate.

High interest rates in the island are now bringing higher returns to firms like insurers which have fixed income portfolios but many insurers are also finding it hard to sell new life insurance with high inflation robbing people's purchasing power.

Allianz says it is opening new branches in Kurunegala and Panadura as it moves into the life market.

(LBO)

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Software AG, a global leader in business infrastructure software, today recognized Bank Mandiri, Cox Communications and Florida Community College Jacksonville as 2008 Software AG Customer Innovation Award Winners. They were named winners in the Innovation, Productivity, Customer Service and Return-on-Investment (ROI) categories respectively. Other finalists included Autotrader.com, EPCOR, ING, Kogun and MAPFRE. In addition, Satyam Computer Services was recognized as the Partner Innovation Award Winner for the company's work with Tele2. Satyam won the award last year for its New Bangkok International Airport implementation. The awards were presented at Innovation World 2008, Software AG's global user conference taking place this week in Miami, Florida.

"Technology's role in improving business performance has never been greater or more important. Having accepted this mandate, our winners have established themselves as game-changers in their use of technology to achieve corporate objectives," said Karl-Heinz Streibich, CEO, Software AG. "The significant results that our winners and finalists achieved also underscore the strategic role that business infrastructure software plays. With a more adaptive IT infrastructure, these enterprises are able to meet core demands more efficiently, respond to changes in the business faster and deliver real innovation. This equates directly to the pricing power, customer intimacy and product and service leadership that are fundamental to long-term competitiveness."

The Software AG Customer and Partner Innovation Awards recognize customers and partners for their successful use of Software AG technology and services to enhance Customer Service, foster Innovation, improve Productivity, and maximize ROI. In addition to webMethods and CentraSite(TM) customers, Adabas and Natural users were eligible to compete in this year's competition for the first-time ever, capturing top honors in several categories. Distinguished judges included Roger Burlton, founder, Process Renewal Group; Jim Ericson, editorial director, DM Review and BI Review magazine; Ian Finley, research director, AMR Research; and Ivo Totev, chief marketing officer, Software AG.

Software AG Customer Innovation Awards: The Winners

Innovation

Bank Mandiri, Indonesia's largest banking company, sought to grow market share via expansion of its payments processing business. By using the webMethods Suite, the bank was able to develop in just three weeks a new payments processing platform that delivered additional services to its commercial customers. This allowed key customers, such as Indonesia's state oil company, to outsource the processing of payments, invoices and orders to Bank Mandiri as a means for reducing fulfillment costs and improving order accuracy. As a result, the bank was able to nearly triple transaction volume with these strategic customers in the first year of operations.

"A key challenge for all businesses going forth is how you manage your relationships with external trading partners," said Burlton. "By taking advantage of a SOA-based approach, Bank Mandiri is able to wrap its unique capabilities around the specific requirements of key customers. This is allowing the bank to deliver core services far more efficiently and effectively than the in-house alternative. This type of win/win business partnership is one of the hallmarks of the new economy."

Productivity

As the third-largest cable provider in the U.S., Cox Communications is recognized for both the strength of its broadband network and its superior customer service. Much of this reputation relies on the strength of its field service technicians with both worker productivity and service assurance being key concerns for the company. Leveraging webMethods BPMS, Cox was able to create a new service portal to synchronize and optimize all work order tasks. Not only has this produced a significant improvement in productivity, but customer service has improved and employees are now better equipped to solve specific challenges.

"While having the right person at the right place at the right time sounds easy, customers of many of Cox's competitors will tell you that it isn't so," said Ericson. "By taking a holistic look at all of the factors impacting performance, Cox has been able to systematically streamline this process. The end result is a win/win/win situation as customers are happier, productivity is improved and needed information is more readily accessible."

Customer Service

While customer service may not typically be associated with higher education, this focus has made Florida Community College Jacksonville one of the largest baccalaureate colleges in the United States, serving more than 73,000 students a year. Recognizing the need to keep pace with escalating demands, including an anticipated doubling in online enrollment, the school took advantage of the webMethods Application Modernization Suite to extend their core Adabas/Natural educational system online. More specifically, they created a comprehensive online system called Connections that enables students to enroll, select courses, complete coursework and manage their entire educational experience through a single Web-based portal. This has allowed the school to create tighter bonds with its student population, reduce administrative costs, and take advantage of real-time feedback to further improve the curriculum.

"Market leaders are often defined on their ability to manage, exploit and present data. This is certainly the case with Florida Community College Jacksonville," said Finley. "With their focus on making their educational processes fully-accessible via the Web, they're making it possible for online students to interact with the school as easily as those attending in-person. This is critical to their strategy of growing their distance learning programs significantly."

Return on Investment (ROI)

At a major US bank, a plethora of mission-critical systems are at the core of its 24 by 7 global operating environment. To ensure continued competitiveness, cost-effectiveness and compliance, these systems are being continually updated and modernized. For one initiative involving an account management application, the firm took advantage of the webMethods Application Modernization Suite to bring a Web 2.0 style user interface to an existing green screen system. By consolidating 15-20 individual screens into a composite application, they were able to significantly improve productivity and data accuracy while eliminating the training burden of the previous system.

"What impressed the judges most about this project was their strategic and pragmatic approach," said Totev. "They choose to focus on the strategic business value amassed in customer records over decades. As a result, they were able to quickly implement a very elegant and intuitive solution for unlocking this value."

Partner Innovation

Working with Tele2, Europe's next-generation telecommunications provider, Satyam Computer Services was able to develop a new system for automating the company's order management and service fulfillment process. This system builds upon the webMethods ESB and webMethods BPMS to help customer service representatives and self-service users more quickly and accurately configure each unique order. As a result, Tele2 has been able to dramatically reduce by 90% the time it takes to bring new products to market while reducing order fulfillment costs in a similarly dramatic manner.

"We congratulate Satyam on their back-to-back wins of this prestigious award," said Arnold Huffman, senior vice president, Business Development & Industry Partnerships, Software AG. "In their work with Tele2, they've demonstrated the value that process frameworks can play in conjunction with our business process management technology. This allows customers to quickly capitalize on the insight and experience of industry leaders like Satyam as they develop best-in-class solutions for their unique business challenges."

"Strategically, we're focused on expanding our footprint within key markets. This requires a more flexible provisioning and fulfillment process that can keep pace with our expanded product offering, such as our need to dynamically bundle and configure orders on-demand," said Mark Willems, Manager - Middleware, Provisioning & Billing, Tele2, Netherlands. "By itself, this would be a huge challenge. However, coupled with the need to continually update our service offering, it could be insurmountable. Fortunately, Software AG and Satyam offered us a process-based approach that leveraged off-the-shelf IT components as the foundation for our solution. This has allowed us to take advantage of a state-of-the-art solution to drive our growth in a key market."

CentraSite is a joint trademark of Fujitsu Limited and Software AG in the United States and other countries.

Software AG - Uhlandstrasse 12 - 64297 Darmstadt - Germany

Software AG is the world's largest independent provider of Business Infrastructure Software. Our 4,000 global enterprise customers achieve business results faster by modernizing, integrating and automating their IT systems and processes. As a result, they rapidly build measurable business value and meet changing business demands. Based on our solutions, organizations are able to liberate and govern their data, systems, applications, processes and services -- achieving new levels of business flexibility.

Our leading product portfolio includes solutions for high performance data management, developing and modernizing applications, enabling service-oriented architecture, and improving business processes. By combining our technology with industry expertise and best practices experience, our customers improve and differentiate their businesses -- faster.

Software AG has almost 40 years of global IT experience and over 3,600 employees serving customers in 70 countries. The company is headquartered in Germany and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange (TecDAX, ISIN DE 0003304002 / SOW). Software AG posted total revenues of 621 million in 2007.

Software AG -- Get There Faster

SOURCE: Software AG

Software AG 
Paul Hughes 
Director Media Relations 
+49 (0) 6151-92-1787 
Fax +49 (0) 6151-92-1623 
paul.hughes@softwareag.com 
or 
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+49 (0) 6151-92-1146 
Fax +49 (0) 6151-92-1623 
norbert.eder@softwareag.com

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