Informatica Corporation, the provider of data integration software, has announced the immediate availability of two data integration capabilities of special relevance to the insurance industry: XMap and HParser. Working alone or in concert, the improved capabilities enable insurance organisations to more effectively address the opportunities and challenges around ACORD insurance standards and big data.

In a recent customer-hosted benchmark, XMap and HParser were used in the processing of three gigabytes of proprietary insurance XML on Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Amazon EMR). The entire XML processing took only 50 seconds on a 16-node Amazon EMR cluster.

"Eighty percent of ACORD data adheres to XML standards and anything that eases and speeds XML mappings and transformations can have a hugely positive impact on insurance operations," said Ash Kulkarni, Senior Vice President and General Manager, B2B and Messaging, Informatica. "The XMap and HParser capabilities in Informatica 9.5 are setting the standard in terms of solutions needed for insurance IT organisations - the former for how it enables the most complex ACORD XML schemas to be mapped with ease and the latter for how it efficiently executes XML transformations natively on Hadoop clusters for cost-effective, high-performance processing of big insurance data."

Together, XMap and HParser empower insurance organisations to maximise their return on Big Data by lowering the costs of mapping, transforming and processing big insurance data. In addition, this offering is increasing the value of the data through improved business access to information, more efficient data-driven business processes and the ability to engage in Big Data analytics.

Embeddable in any enterprise architecture, Informatica XMap is designed specifically to handle the complexities of ACORD XML schemas. With XMap, users leverage a visual drag-and-drop design environment to visually create XML mappings that can be interactively iterated and enhanced over time. It can easily map the most intricate LAH, PCS and RLC schemas, with built-in debugging. It also uses standard XPath v2 language to express mapping logic, enabling reuse of existing XPath skills and the wealth of XPath materials available online.

Informatica HParser 9.5 is the latest version of Informatica HParser, the first data transformation environment optimised for Hadoop and endorsed by such big data processing leaders as Amazon EMR, Cloudera, EMC Greenplum, Hortonworks and MapR. With HParser 9.5, Informatica introduces the ability to execute logic natively on Hadoop to take advantage of Hadoop performance for a variety of formats, including ACORD XML, DTCC, AL3 and EDI. It also runs on Amazon EMR in the cloud to reduce start-up costs, provisioning only the Hadoop nodes required for a specific job.

As with XMap, HParser users leverage a visual design studio for creating custom transformations and executions, and can access a portfolio of building block for creating complex transformations. HParser is designed to be distributed across multiple nodes of an Hadoop cluster, where HParser transformation read data from the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) and deliver results transparently to MapReduce logic.