Asia-Pacific insurers are planning to increase their IT
budgets in 2011-2012 thanks to the economic growth in the region, according to
Ovum.

Around 29 percent of Asia-Pacific insurers expect that
the IT budgets for both external and internal IT will significantly increase
(at more than 6 percent) and that over 53 percent are looking to increase IT
budgets in 2011/2012, a 6 percent increase on the 2010/2011 period.

Coming out of the post-financial crisis economic
situation, the Asia-Pacific region is in a growth mode. Although Asia-Pacific
insurers are struggling with having more insurance business operating systems
than they want, they are planning to increase IT budgets in 2012,” said Barry
Rabkin, Ovum’s Insurance Technology principal analyst.

 

In addition to increasing their IT budgets, 51 percent of
Asia-Pacific insurers are comfortable using outsourcing such as business
process outsourcing (BPO), and 56 percent are using IT function outsourcing
(ITO) for five of the 10 IT functions in the survey: network services, desktop
management, IT security, applications development, and application management.
Compared to their peers in North America and EMEA, Asia-Pacifc insurers are
more proactively chasing the web 2.0 marketplace by choosing service-orientated
architecture (SOA), software-as-a-service (SaaS), and rich Internet applications
(RIAs).

Interestingly, for an industry slow to adopt new
technologies, 43 percent of the Asia-Pacific insurers surveyed have deployed or
are experimenting with private cloud. The same can be said for business
intelligence (BI), where Asia-Pacific insurers are increasingly leveraging BI
tools to target customer retention (86 percent rated this as the most important
driver for BI usage). 

By Telecomlead.com Team
[email protected]