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Sybase, Pinpoint crunch the numbers

Sybase and Pinpoint Solutions say they have developed a number-crunching database intended to help the insurance industry maximize profit.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
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Kim Girard
Sybase and insurance and financial software company Pinpoint Solutions say they have developed a number-crunching database intended to help the insurance industry maximize profit.

Sybase customers can now use the company's data warehousing platform with Pinpoint's decision support software to quickly do profitability analysis, track customer behavior, and product pricing, the companies announced today.

As the financial industry continues to shrink among mergers and acquisitions, competition has become increasingly fierce, so insurance companies are looking inward to maximize profitability with better and faster data analysis.

Pinpoint's system, used to analyze risk and model data, relies on Sybase's transaction processing database, Adaptive Server Enterprise and Adaptive Server IQ. In addition, Sybase's PowerDimensions ROLAP server enables Pinpoint's users to perform complex analysis.

"The end result is that users throughout an organization can access raw and calculated information at a detailed level enabling them to make more informed business decisions," said Rick Baff, president of Livingston, New Jersey-based Pinpoint Solutions. Pinpoint plans to integrate Web publishing capabilities into the software.