Towers Watson Introduces Life Insurance Financial Modeling On A Cloud Computing Grid

NEW YORK, Sept. 27 -- Towers Watson issued the following news release:

Towers Watson (NYSE, NASDAQ: TW), a global professional services company, has launched MoSes Azure (http://www.towerswatson.com/services/Software-Solutions/8029), a new software integration product that enables life insurers to run MoSes financial models in Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud Services. Insurers can now run their models against an on-demand, cloud-based grid, providing massive computing resources without the standing costs of in-house infrastructure. The ability to access extra computer power as needed will help insurers improve their financial modeling analytics for better management of risk and capital.

"For most life insurers, computing resource demands for financial modeling fluctuate greatly from typical daily use to heavy use at quarter-and year-end," said Todd Erkis, global life software product manager, Towers Watson. "Insurers must decide on the appropriate level of investment for in-house computing resources. Should they invest in maximum capacity to handle peak demand, knowing they'll have idle capacity during off-peak periods? Or should they invest to support typical demand, knowing they will suffer capacity constraints during peak demand? It's a very difficult decision."

With the introduction of MoSes Azure, insurers can now run their MoSes models distributed either in-house with MoSes HPC, in Windows Azure Cloud Services with MoSes Azure or in a seamless combination of both. "Insurers can get exactly the resources they need for timely financial analytics without choosing between investing in idle resources or facing insufficient computing capacity," said Erkis.

MoSes Azure takes full advantage of the security features available in Windows Azure Cloud Services. Microsoft has achieved a variety of security compliance audit certifications with Windows Azure to give users confidence that their data is safely guarded during transmission, storage and processing in the cloud. Further, Windows Azure runs in geographically dispersed data centers managed and operated by Microsoft, delivering a 99.95% service-level agreement for high availability while freeing the insurer from the burden of maintaining the infrastructure.

"MoSes Azure provides a signature example of one of the ways that cloud computing can help insurers address their risk, regulatory and IT cost management needs today. In this case, Microsoft provides an infrastructure as a service behind a leading actuarial modeling solution to provide the compute capacity needed to run more models more often and for greater resulting accuracy," said Tony Jacob, managing director, worldwide insurance, Microsoft Corporation. "This should be exciting for insurers that are looking at their quarterly and annual reporting needs, or are responding to the requirements of regulatory changes. They now can benefit from the great work that Towers Watson has done to leverage the massive scalability, flexibility, security and resiliency of a Microsoft cloud-based grid."

MoSes 6.6 and RiskAgility MoSes 3.2

In addition to its MoSes Azure announcement, Towers Watson has also released updated versions of MoSes 6.6 financial modeling software, and RiskAgility MoSes 3.2, an enterprise financial modeling platform for MoSes applications. MoSes Azure is available for licensing with the release of MoSes version 6.6.

The updated MoSes version 6.6 software delivers the ability to manage report output definitions using output filter sets. This enhancement makes MoSes reporting easier and more flexible. This version also provides improved integration with the Microsoft Windows HPC Server to help insurers achieve better job prioritization and utilization of their grid computing resources.

RiskAgility MoSes version 3.2 gives insurance companies the option to define additional validation criteria when enforcing model version control. It also provides extra options for storing project components, more efficient grid failover job processing, and improvements to datapack version display and run log generation. These enhancements make it easier for insurers to manage and control their financial modeling production environment.

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