IVANS, Metaserver Form Strategic Alliance

Metaserver, Inc., a developer of business process integration (BPI) software, has entered into a strategic partnership agreement with IVANS Insurance E-Commerce Solutions, a division of IVANS, Inc.

Under the terms of the agreement, Metaserver and IVANS will engage in joint selling and marketing activities and offer a complete, packaged solution to help property and casualty carriers fulfill real-time requests from independent agents. The requests include new business transactions such as homeowners and auto quoting and new policy issuance, as well as first notice of loss, claims inquiry, billing inquiry, and other personal and commercial lines transactions supported by ACORD XML.

The IVANS-Metaserver offering is one of the first packaged solutions geared towards enabling real-time, round-trip transactions between carriers and agents. The combined solution also supports the insurance industry’s SEMCI (Single Entry Multiple Company Interface) goals for eliminating duplicate data entry between independent agents and P/C insurers, and the implementation of ACORD XML to facilitate the processing of transactions in real-time.

Metaserver and IVANS have agreed to combine their core technologies, which include Metaserver 4 along with IVANS Transformation Station(TM) and Transformation Xpress(TM). The packaged solution will feature pre-defined business processes to map ACORD XML transactions to business applications, pre-loaded ACORD XML data definitions, point-and-click connectors to access legacy applications and other back-office systems, and data transformation capabilities for XML, AL3, and other proprietary and standards-based data formats.

The solution includes services to help customers get up and running on their carrier-agency integration efforts, such as pre-configured connectivity to IVANS Transformation Station to allow rapid rollout of an IVANS Destination Station. IVANS Transformation Station is an Internet data exchange using Web services and ACORD XML for real-time transactions between agency and carrier systems.