The virtual datastore combines ROLAP flexibility with system scalability. “One of our customers has more than 35 million policies running in ProfitCube, and another has 70 dimensions,” Theriault said.
Pinpoint shares Thazar's view on data mining and privacy: “The analysis isn't the issue,” Theriault explained. “It's what you do with it.”

Teradata
www.teradata.com

NCR subsidiary Teradata has built a number of intelligence tools designed to be deployed with its Teradata Warehouse, including Teradata Warehouse Miner, a structured data mining tool, and Teradata Search, for mining unstructured data such as text and graphics.

Teradata's analytic application is Behavior Explorer for Insurance. In 2001, the company introduced insurance-specific indicators for Behavior Explorer to evaluate premium, expense, claims, and retention data and to support personalized sales and marketing. Behavior Explorer contains Product View, which focuses on distribution and cross-selling opportunities, and Transaction View, which tracks each interaction with a policyholder and analyzes effectiveness of sales channels. Teradata will be integrating a text mining tool to analyze non-fielded data entered on applications and correspondence.

Parent company NCR also offers NCR Privacy Protector, which adds fields to the warehouse to provide opt-out and other privacy controls, and potentially allows customers to review and update the personal information stored in a Teradata warehouse. “To the extent that insurers can maintain, control, and monitor access to their customer data in the data warehouse, this will minimize their risk. We believe the concern is in both the action and the analysis,” said Patricia Saporito, senior insurance industry consultant at Teradata. “You want to have a privacy framework in place, whether it's for compliance or just good business practice.” Because Teradata Miner is designed to run directly on top of the warehouse, Privacy Protector could exclude customer data from analytical applications as well as indicate customer preferences to the customer contact center.

Thazar Solutions Corporation
www.thazar.com

Thazar markets its InsSight Business Intelligence Suite, which it sells as a locally run suite of applications or as an ASP-based service. In either model, the insurer extracts data according to the Thazar data model and maps it to a template. In the ASP model, the insurer then sends an encrypted XML datastream to Thazar.
Users-including staff and agents-access InsSight via a proprietary interface called InsSight Prophet Center, that provides personalized reporting based on user/role access controls.

In addition to supporting common query tools, Thazar has developed managed query applications and four prebuilt applications currently available with InsSight to monitor retention, claims, changes in a book of business, and impacts of competitors' actions.

“It's a collaborative system,” said Thazar founder and executive vice president Tom Chesbrough. “If Marketing contributes data about another insurer's rate change and Underwriting sees a change in incoming customer profiles, it can…put that information together and act on it.” Thazar is scheduling additional applications for delivery this year, and InsSight's open architecture is designed to encourage third party business intelligence application development.

Thazar maintains its systems do not put insurers at risk for consumer privacy issues. “We help insurers analyze information they already have on a level that doesn't impact personal privacy,” Chesbrough said, adding that the company itself has been responding to many requests by clients to sign or amend contracts to reflect their own internal privacy policies based on their roles both as system vendor and ASP.