NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

Advisen Ltd., the single source solution for insurance intelligence,
today announced the company is dividing its business into three separate
units, Research Editorial, Information Analytics and Web
Connectivity, to reflect increased focused on specific growth areas.

The Research Editorial unit, which Advisen informally calls its
“Enlighten” unit, will focus on communicating, educating and delivering
insights and information by topic, line of business, industry segment
and marketplace.

The Information Analytics unit, which Advisen has tagged its “Solve”
unit, will center on gathering, distilling, translating, analyzing and
delivering critical information to insurance professionals to help them
assess and transact in the market.

Web Connectivity, Advisen’s London-based software unit, which Advisen
has dubbed its “Streamline” unit, will enable brokers, insurers and
reinsurers to communicate risk data securely and support documents
throughout the lifecycle of a risk.

“We are structuring the company for the next era in commercial insurance
where the industry will rely on research, analytics and software to
ensure professionals are well informed and can accelerate the value they
bring to their business clients,” said Tom Ruggieri, CEO of Advisen.
“These new units will focus Advisen’s benefits for our customers and
assist the insurance industry’s evolution to impacting businesses and
economies at greater levels.”

Areas of focus for the Research Editorial unit include Advisen’s
industry-leading e-news-service Front
Page News, research reports, journals, webinars and community events
to bring together buyers, brokers and insurers to collaborate and
highlight on key industry perspectives.

Through its aggregated data from 16 million global companies and
subsidiaries, Advisen’s analytics tools within the Information
Analytics division will help drive business and industry analysis;
pricing and loss analysis; portfolio and risk benchmarking; marketing,
product and business development; and risk management strategies.

The Web Connectivity unit will utilize its award-winning ACORD Messaging
Gateway system, which facilitates straight through processing of data
into insurance firms’ internal systems by supporting the sending and
receiving of placing, endorsement, accounting and settlement, claims,
and document repository messages.

Advisen announced separately that two industry veterans have joined the
company to lead its predictive analytics work. Seth Rachlin joined
Advisen as an executive vice president and president of the new
Information and Analytics business unit. Rachlin previously served as
the CEO of Moore Stephens Business Solutions, where he supplied Business
Intelligence solutions and has over 20 years’ experience in building and
advising insurance, technology and market analytics companies.

John Pagliaccio has joined as executive vice president to lead specific
efforts around analytics. Pagliaccio was previously President of Carvill
ReAdvisory, an intermediary focusing on reinsurance solutions, and
brings 40 years of experience in insurance, reinsurance and enterprise
risk management analytics.

Advisen Ltd.

Advisen generates, integrates, analyses and communicates unbiased,
real-time insights for the global community of commercial insurance
professionals. As a single source solution, Advisen helps the insurance
industry to more productively drive mission critical decisions about
pricing, loss experience, underwriting, marketing, transacting or
purchasing commercial insurance.

Advisen’s data, analytics and news services are game-changers for more
than 125,000 professionals. Visit us at www.advisen.com
or contact support@advisen.com
to learn more.

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/advisen-divides-core-business-separate-120000630.html

TYSONS CORNER, Va., April 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR – News), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that Usher 1.1, a free event management app linked to Facebook events and groups, is now available worldwide with new features and enhancements for users to easily plan an event from their iPhones. Users can download the app by going to http://www.usher.com and clicking on the link to the App Store.

Make the Most of your Facebook Network with Usher
Using the Usher app on your iPhone, you can easily manage an event from beginning to end and invite guests from your Facebook network. Whether your next event is a student event, charity benefit, or nightclub party, you can invite “All Friends” with the tap of a button, or use Usher’s convenient filters (such as gender, age, interests, and location) to invite your guests.  You can check RSVPs in real-time and invite guests at the last minute.  Usher delivers mobile tickets to your guests’ smartphones so your guests don’t have to worry about losing their tickets or waiting in a long line at the door.  Usher also allows you to check people in on your iPhone using multiple validation methods, such as Facebook photo, QR Code, Sight Code™, Usher Code™, Electronic Guest List, and Printed Guest List. 

Usher 1.1 Enhancements Include:

• Improved Offline Support. Event organizers now have the ability to validate guests while in offline mode, and guests can show their tickets when their iPhones are in offline mode, making wireless connectivity unnecessary.
• Support for Group Events, Page Events, and Badges. Event organizers and guests can utilize Usher ticketing and check-ins for group events, page events, and social loyalty programs. Restaurants and other establishments are leveraging Facebook Groups and using Usher to offer special deals to their patrons.
• Ability to Assign Multiple Event Hosts. Event organizers can assign multiple hosts in Facebook to manage an event within the app. Having multiple hosts allows all event organizers to manage the event easily from their mobile device, especially for large student events and nightclubs.
• Multiple Event Validation.  Event door managers can validate tickets to any and all events in one location, without the need to switch multiple times within the app.
• 3-D Visualization of Events. Event guests can use Usher’s 3-D augmented reality geographic capabilities to find their events on the go and view event details before deciding which event to attend.
• Enhanced Demographic Visualizations.  Event organizers can better personalize events to their invitees’ interests with easy to understand demographic visualizations of interests, gender, relationship status, and age.
• New Sight Code Themes.  Event organizers can now choose from seven animated sight code themes, including distinctive 3-D models and fractals, to use as their event’s ticket validation code.

“The latest release of Usher has exciting new features that take event management to a whole new level of simplicity and make the most of your Facebook network,” said Glen Goldstein, Vice President, Marketing, MicroStrategy Incorporated. “Usher is currently being used at universities and nightclubs across the DC metropolitan area with tremendous success. With Usher, organizers better understand and connect to their target audience, while providing customer service above and beyond what is expected.”

For more information, visit http://www.usher.com.

About MicroStrategy
Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a leading provider of enterprise software platforms for business intelligence (BI), mobile intelligence, and social intelligence applications.  MicroStrategy’s BI platform enables leading organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make better business decisions.  Companies choose MicroStrategy BI for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability.  MicroStrategy’s mobile intelligence platform helps companies and organizations build, deploy, and maintain mobile apps across a range of solutions by embedding intelligence, transactions, and multimedia into apps.  MicroStrategy’s social intelligence platform includes a number of applications that help enterprises harness the power of social networks for marketing and e-commerce, as well as a suite of free consumer friendly apps that use MicroStrategy’s enterprise technologies.  The MicroStrategy Cloud offering combines MicroStrategy and third-party software, hardware, and services to enable rapid, cost-effective development of hosted BI, mobile, and social applications.  To learn more about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR – News), visit www.microstrategy.com and follow us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/microstrategy) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/microstrategy).

MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform, MicroStrategy Cloud, MicroStrategy Mobile, Cloud Personal, MicroStrategy Transaction Services, Wisdom, MicroStrategy Wisdom and Emma are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

MSTR-G

Contact:
Warren Getler
MicroStrategy Incorporated
703-744-6258
wgetler@microstrategy.com

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/microstrategy-introduces-usher-1-1-120000871.html

SAN MATEO, Calif., April 16, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Analytics software company FirstRain has announced the release of FirstTweets™, the world’s first solution for extracting business-relevant Twitter intelligence for sales, marketing and senior leadership teams.

FirstTweets™ delivers real-time industry- and customer-specific information to uncover revenue opportunities, including customer developments, industry trends, news, market analysis, emerging themes and much more. FirstTweets™ delivers the information directly into CRM systems, social enterprise platforms, iPads and other mobile devices.

“Like the browser did for the Internet and the iPod did for digital music, FirstTweets™ is a breakthrough technology that takes a powerful, yet time-consuming capability and harnesses it for practical, daily use. FirstTweets™ collects and organizes business-relevant intelligence from Twitter, which until now has been a time-consuming and unorganized burden on the business professional,” said FirstRain CEO Penny Herscher. “For the first time, busy executives will have the ability to easily and effectively access the incredible wealth of customer and industry intelligence flowing through the Twitter stream every day. FirstTweets™ solves the major challenge of Twitter for most business professionals: how to get real, daily business value from Twitter without living a Twitter lifestyle.”

Unlike keyword-based media monitoring and public relations-focused applications such as Radian6 and Meltwater News, FirstRain’s unique and powerful technology takes the full fire hose of 250 million tweets per day and applies patented semantic analytics and algorithms to uncover, categorize and deliver only high-quality, business-relevant intelligence about global companies, industries and business topics. This information can then be easily integrated into the wide range of mobile devices, social platforms and other workflow systems that sales and marketing professionals use when looking for the kind of daily intelligence that increases revenue for their businesses.

“We are bombarded with information daily,” says Sue Feldman, IDC’s vice president for search and discovery technologies.  “Most of the information is fairly insignificant, but the sheer volume of what we receive obscures what’s important and relevant.  New tools, like FirstRain’s FirstTweets, may help us cope by surfacing what’s important and new and suppressing what’s duplicated or marginal.  What we all need to know today is not what’s happening but what’s happening that we need to pay attention to.  That’s the value of these applications.”

Newly conducted Twitter dataset analysis reveals that only 0.1 percent of all Twitter content provides quality, business-relevant intelligence (see infographic). FirstRain’s engines analyze and filter out not only business-irrelevant content such as entertainment, sports, political, junk and spam tweets, but also the consumer-generated commentary which, while useful for brand management, is not helpful to the majority of sales and marketing professionals and executives.

“FirstRain’s semantic algorithms filter out 99.9 percent of all tweets, and yet, that still yields more than 250,000 interesting and relevant business tweets per day,” said Herscher. “The combination of FirstRain’s semantic modeling, our ability to effectively categorize this intelligence by company, industry and more than 9,000 business topics, then personalizing and delivering it right into your iPad, mobile device or enterprise platform means that business users will get a Twitter-based intelligence solution they’ve truly never seen before—one that’s actually useful in their daily business.”

FirstTweets™ can be easily deployed as part of the FirstRain Enterprise Customer Intelligence System, an end-to-end solution that delivers personalized customer and industry intelligence across an entire global enterprise. FirstTweets™ enterprise-wide deployment enables companies to:

• Dramatically improve the value of CRM and SFA investments in Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle Fusion and others, delivering the most relevant, revenue-generating customer intelligence directly into a salesperson’s account workflow.
• Drive greater engagement within social enterprise platforms such as Jive, Salesforce Chatter, Cisco Quad, Microsoft SharePoint or Yammer, seamlessly integrating the highly specific customer and market intelligence around which users collaborate.
• Better leverage their mobile workforce, delivering real-time business-relevant Twitter and Web intelligence directly into enterprise-deployed iPads, iPhones and Android phones.

Available Wednesday, FirstTweets™ will be included for FirstRain subscribers. For standalone integration into CRM and social enterprise platforms, FirstTweets™ starts at $10,000 per year for 100 users. For more information, visit www.FirstRain.com.

About FirstRain
FirstRain is a pioneer and leader in Enterprise Customer Intelligence. FirstRain’s flexible solution provides sales, marketing and finance professionals highly relevant customer and industry information to increase revenue and strengthen customer relationships. The patented semantic analytics technology in FirstRain’s Business Monitoring Engine™ instantly cuts through the clutter of consumer-Web content, delivering only highly relevant intelligence from the business Web. FirstRain’s Enterprise Customer Intelligence System integrates seamlessly into the world’s premiere CRM and social enterprise platforms, including Salesforce.com, Chatter, Cisco Quad, Microsoft SharePoint and Dynamics, Jive and Yammer, and it is incorporated into leading research platforms such as Standard Poor’s Capital IQ, Dun Bradstreet, FactSet Research Systems, Fidelity.com and Mergent. Based in San Mateo, California, FirstRain also has offices in New York and Gurgaon, India. To read our blog, visit us at http://www.firstrain.com/marketmine/.

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/firstrain-unveils-firsttweets-bringing-business-140300413.html

Eagle
Creek Software Services, a United States-based IT consulting and
technical services company specializing in Oracle CRM, business
intelligence and enterprise software development, introduces its
continuous enhancement support (CES) initiative to provide Oracle/Siebel
CRM and BI users with extended product support beyond initial software
implementation.

The initiative relies on the company’s domestic project centers to
provide all the resources needed to support and extend the capabilities
of Oracle CRM and BI implementations to organizations as they manage
budget, resourcing and quality challenges. Eagle Creek’s CES is designed
to support Siebel environments at a lower cost with project centers that
are staffed with experienced consultants who are dedicated to the Siebel
environment. The initiative includes services for four major areas
including:

• User Support – “How to” mentoring and ongoing training, user and
  security setup and service request triage
• Application Support – Incident management, workarounds and service
  request resolutions
• Application Enhancement – Ad hoc development, custom enhancements and
  data loads
• Application Maintenance – Monitoring, administration, development of
  patches, performance assessments and back up

“Traditional onsite services are costly, and relying exclusively on
offshore product support is hazardous due to distance, communications
challenges and inconsistent resources. Eagle Creek’s U.S.-based project
centers provide customers with a consistent high-quality, cost effective
support alternative without overburdening internal staff,” said Ken
Behrendt, president of Eagle Creek. “Eagle Creek guarantees maximum
value for users from the CES program with its dedicated Siebel
specialists to ensure customers receive extended product support outside
of implementation.”

About Eagle Creek Software Services

Founded in 1999, Eagle Creek (Eden Prairie, Minn) is the largest United
States-based provider of IT consulting and technical expertise to
organizations using Oracle CRM, business intelligence and enterprise
software development. The company offers cost-effective, higher quality
software development and support services using its Dakota Model. Eagle
Creek has three project centers in low-cost areas within the United
States and utilizes a private-public strategic alliance with the state
governments of North Dakota and South Dakota to achieve consistency and
sustainability in the recruitment, training and development of the
company’s 300+ Dakota-based consultants. For more information, visit the
company website at http://www.eaglecrk.com.

Article source: http://us.generation-nt.com/eagle-creek-software-services-introduces-continuous-enhancement-press-3494182.html

TYSONS CORNER, Va., April 16, 2012 — /PRNewswire/ – MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that Usher 1.1, a free event management app linked to Facebook events and groups, is now available worldwide with new features and enhancements for users to easily plan an event from their iPhones. Users can download the app by going to http://www.usher.com and clicking on the link to the App Store.

Make the Most of your Facebook Network with Usher Using the Usher app on your iPhone, you can easily manage an event from beginning to end and invite guests from your Facebook network. Whether your next event is a student event, charity benefit, or nightclub party, you can invite “All Friends” with the tap of a button, or use Usher’s convenient filters (such as gender, age, interests, and location) to invite your guests.  You can check RSVPs in real-time and invite guests at the last minute.  Usher delivers mobile tickets to your guests’ smartphones so your guests don’t have to worry about losing their tickets or waiting in a long line at the door.  Usher also allows you to check people in on your iPhone using multiple validation methods, such as Facebook photo, QR Code, Sight Code™, Usher Code™, Electronic Guest List, and Printed Guest List. 

Usher 1.1 Enhancements Include:

• Improved Offline Support. Event organizers now have the ability to validate guests while in offline mode, and guests can show their tickets when their iPhones are in offline mode, making wireless connectivity unnecessary.
• Support for Group Events, Page Events, and Badges. Event organizers and guests can utilize Usher ticketing and check-ins for group events, page events, and social loyalty programs. Restaurants and other establishments are leveraging Facebook Groups and using Usher to offer special deals to their patrons.
• Ability to Assign Multiple Event Hosts. Event organizers can assign multiple hosts in Facebook to manage an event within the app. Having multiple hosts allows all event organizers to manage the event easily from their mobile device, especially for large student events and nightclubs.
• Multiple Event Validation.  Event door managers can validate tickets to any and all events in one location, without the need to switch multiple times within the app.
• 3-D Visualization of Events. Event guests can use Usher’s 3-D augmented reality geographic capabilities to find their events on the go and view event details before deciding which event to attend.
• Enhanced Demographic Visualizations.  Event organizers can better personalize events to their invitees’ interests with easy to understand demographic visualizations of interests, gender, relationship status, and age.
• New Sight Code Themes.  Event organizers can now choose from seven animated sight code themes, including distinctive 3-D models and fractals, to use as their event’s ticket validation code.

“The latest release of Usher has exciting new features that take event management to a whole new level of simplicity and make the most of your Facebook network,” said Glen Goldstein, Vice President, Marketing, MicroStrategy Incorporated. “Usher is currently being used at universities and nightclubs across the DC metropolitan area with tremendous success. With Usher, organizers better understand and connect to their target audience, while providing customer service above and beyond what is expected.”

For more information, visit http://www.usher.com.

About MicroStrategy Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a leading provider of enterprise software platforms for business intelligence (BI), mobile intelligence, and social intelligence applications.  MicroStrategy’s BI platform enables leading organizations worldwide to analyze the vast amounts of data stored across their enterprises to make better business decisions.  Companies choose MicroStrategy BI for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability.  MicroStrategy’s mobile intelligence platform helps companies and organizations build, deploy, and maintain mobile apps across a range of solutions by embedding intelligence, transactions, and multimedia into apps.  MicroStrategy’s social intelligence platform includes a number of applications that help enterprises harness the power of social networks for marketing and e-commerce, as well as a suite of free consumer friendly apps that use MicroStrategy’s enterprise technologies.  The MicroStrategy Cloud offering combines MicroStrategy and third-party software, hardware, and services to enable rapid, cost-effective development of hosted BI, mobile, and social applications.  To learn more about MicroStrategy (Nasdaq: MSTR), visit www.microstrategy.com and follow us on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/microstrategy) and Twitter (http://www.twitter.com/microstrategy).

MicroStrategy, MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform, MicroStrategy Cloud, MicroStrategy Mobile, Cloud Personal, MicroStrategy Transaction Services, Wisdom, MicroStrategy Wisdom and Emma are either trademarks or registered trademarks of MicroStrategy Incorporated in the United States and certain other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

MSTR-G

Contact: Warren Getler MicroStrategy Incorporated 703-744-6258 wgetler@microstrategy.com

SOURCE MicroStrategy Incorporated

Article source: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/04/16/4417021/microstrategy-introduces-usher.html

Pagliaccio brings 40 years of experience in insurance, reinsurance, and enterprise risk management analytics. He will serve as the executive vice president in the Information Analytics unit, responsible for leading the analytics innovation in Advisen’s new unit. Pagliaccio was previously President of Carvill ReAdvisory, an intermediary specializing in professional liability reinsurance solutions. Prior to that, he was a Managing Director focusing on analysis of all lines of PC at Gallagher Re, Guy Carpenter and RMS. Pagliaccio is an ACAS, ASA, CERA, MAAA, ARM, and PRM.

“Predictive modeling has transformed the personal lines insurance market over the last ten years. Over the next ten years, given the convergence of technology and data assets such as Advisen possesses, we expect to see a parallel track in commercial lines. To demonstrate our commitment to what is clearly the next evolutionary stage in commercial insurance, we attracted two of the market’s premier executives in predictive analytics to lead our team and better serve our customers,” said Tom Ruggieri, CEO of Advisen. “We are confident Seth’s and Pags’ experience will advance Advisen’s existing business and will help to continue to build this new business unit for the company.”

Advisen Ltd.

The Information Analytics unit will center on gathering, distilling, translating and delivering critical information to insurance professionals. Advisen aggregates data from 16 million global companies and subsidiaries, integrates unique and proprietary policy transactions, policy wordings and loss data sets; and generates scores, benchmarks and comparative analytics. The firm’s analytics tools help set and drive competitive pricing analysis, portfolio and risk benchmarking; marketing, product and business development; and risk management strategies.

Advisen generates, integrates, analyses and communicates unbiased, real-time insights for the global community of commercial insurance professionals. As a single source solution, Advisen helps the insurance industry to more productively drive mission critical decisions about pricing, loss experience, underwriting, marketing, transacting or purchasing commercial insurance.

Advisen’s data, analytics and news services are game-changers for more than 125,000 professionals. Visit us at www.advisen.com or contact support@advisen.com to learn more.

Article source: http://www.sunherald.com/2012/04/16/3884433/advisen-hires-insurance-industry.html