View this article online: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/west/2003/07/09/30472.htm
BCF Technology Inc. announced the launch of TIER-XML, an extension of its core Transaction, Integration, Extraction, and Recovery (TIER) Platform Version 3.0 for rapid development of AL3 and XML based transactions.
BCF believes TIER-XML’s significant decrease in implementation costs over current technologies will give the industry a much needed boost for implementing peer to peer, or peer to hub Web services. In the short time the product has been available BCF has successfully implemented the following transactions:
-Business Owners Policy (BOP) quoting transaction that accepts AL3 as input and emits ACORD standard XML.
-A billing inquiry transaction that accepts AL3 and emits a proprietary XML format to call a Web service. The transaction results are re-transformed back to AL3.
-A Workman’s compensation transaction that accepts proprietary XML as input and drives an ACORD standard Web service.
“In analyzing why our customers were not implementing Web services faster, we found that the implementation costs were just too high. The current translation and transaction mapping technology is just not powerful enough to implement real complex transactions like BOP quoting. We took a good long look at how people are implementing these transactions and concluded we needed something that would significantly reduce implementation time and cost in order to have any impact. We have achieved that vision with TIER-XML,” said Fred Covely, CEO of BCF.
Frederick Waite, president of BCF added, “One of our first clients using TIER-XML saw a 5X decrease in cost and a 10X decrease in implementation time. Insurance organizations typically have two barriers to implementing new technology like Web services; time and cost. With TIER-XML we remove those barriers and allow insurance organizations to take advantage of the latest technological advances now, without waiting years and spending an outrageous amount of money.”