Perceptive Software announced its latest Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solution, ImageNow Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

Perceptive Software has a history of developing products and initiatives that complement Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments, making it easy for insurance customers to develop tight, server-side integration between ImageNow and enterprise business systems. ImageNow ESB will provide insurers with an alternative integration methodology to ImageNow’s patented non-programmatic LearnMode technology and functions as the foundation of a new level of integration and data exchange with business applications.

“Insurers are well positioned to fully leverage the benefits provided by SOA because of the unique challenges facing the insurance industry,” said Sascha Ohler, Perceptive Software senior product manager, financial services. “More than any other sector, insurance faces four major obstacles on the path to success: Geographic diversity of sales and support operations, complex value chains, heavy reliance on proprietary legacy systems, and fragmentation and specialisation of business processes and associated applications. SOA provides the underlying infrastructure on which to tightly integrate the diverse processes and applications needed to run an insurance organisation.”

ImageNow ESB enables ImageNow to initiate a request of another application or system that exposes the functionality as a Web service. This request from ImageNow to the external environment can be the result of actions taken within ImageNow, such as a workflow process or from within an eForm.

One example of such integration involves the creation of a new transaction within a claims management system. This transaction would be automatically initiated when ImageNow processes a new document, dramatically increasing processing efficiency by maintaining data integrity and minimising manual data entry.

“ImageNow Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) complements SOA architecture by enabling the tight integration of ImageNow enterprise document management and workflow suite with a broad range of line-of-business (LOB) applications,” Ohler said. “By providing a web services-based method for the real time and secure exchange of transactional data between these systems, ImageNow decreases the need for duplicate manual entry, thereby saving time and increasing overall data quality.”