To Suite or Not to Suite…?

Why Best-of-Breed Solutions May be a Better Option for P&C Insurers than One-Size-Fits-All Suites

It’s one of the most important decisions a large or mid-size P&C insurer can make: When replacing a core system or systems, should you purchase an end-to-end suite from a single vendor or opt for a best-of-breed solution?

Making the wrong decision will be costly and could prevent your organization from achieving its growth objectives.

While an end-to-end suite may look good on paper, promising the convenience of a single solution and a single point of contact for vendor support, this convenience may require you to make major trade-offs down the road.

According to Celent research, when P&C CIOs were asked why they preferred one approach over the other. Those preferring best-of breed responded:

• “It comes down to which vendor system best meets our requirements. We also prefer not to have one vendor supplying all core systems.”
• “We get the value we expect from this approach, at reasonable cost of ownership without carrying the staff to build it, and without committing to an outsourcing deal.”
• “Vendor products have matured and allowed us to differentiate ourselves from our competition.”

(Source: “2010 US Insurance CIO Survey: Pressures, Priorities, and Practices,” Celent, February 2010.)

Once a suite is deployed, many insurers learn the hard way that the solution fails to deliver the needed functionality in a specific area or is too inflexible to meet your business needs. The suite may excel at billing, for example, but lack the product development flexibility needed to deliver true speed to market.

Due to the time and expense required to “rip and replace” an entire suite, insurers simply have to live with these deficiencies for years to come.

New Paper Weighs the Options

To help P&C insurers better understand the pros and cons of best-of-breed solutions versus suites, Camilion has published a new paper “Making the Case for Best-of-Breed Solutions.”

Hear how best-of-breed solutions offer a compelling alternative to suites by allowing you to quickly address high-value areas without requiring an expensive and risky multi-year system replacement initiative. Best-of-breed solutions can deliver the richer functionality that insurers need to gain competitive differentiation, as well as greater vendor self-sufficiency, while reducing implementation risks and accelerating time to ROI.

Read the Paper

To learn more about the advantages of a best-of-breed strategy, download the industry perspective paper.

“It comes down to which vendor system best meets our requirements. We also prefer not to have one vendor supplying all core systems.”