market talk
Familiar face at Cordoba Solutions Amlin’s tough guy
Tarquini returns
H
ere’s a name to conjure with - Tony Tarquini will be recalled by many of those who wrestled in the not too distant past to get insurance IT to where it is today. He was formerly vice president of financial services at Celerant Consulting and previously worked at CSC which is entwined in the SSP story.
He has returned to the industry with the formation of a new venture designed to “bring the next generation of the world wide web to the insurance industry” according to the press release announcing the
launch of Cordoba Solutions utilising the very latest Semantic Web technology. For those unfamiliar with this
technology, it seems the boffins (or geeks as they are perhaps more popularly known) who pioneered the world wide web have now come up with the Semantic Web. Sir Tim Berners Lee, the British inventor of the original www has described this new web as being capable of creating a sea change far greater than that of his original invention. Mr Tarquini says this new web allows companies to access and
in association with
analyse disparate data in ways that previously took years, and cost millions to implement, or were just plain impossible. “Imagine being able to ‘Google’ every piece of data in your organisation, instantly analyse it and make informed decisions on it, all for a fraction of the previous time and cost. That is the power of the Semantic Web.” Cordoba claims to have developed the first application to dynamically analyse the up to the minute, detailed status of projects across an entire change portfolio, reading from the project managers’
Tony Tarquini
source data. They can immediately answer questions that previously took days, if not weeks to answer on subjects ranging from project and programme management, resource, skills and critical dependency management, to benefits realisation, cost control and strategy deployment.
Tough guy all right
Brian Susman writes:
t was a freezing cold day in this part of the West Midlands. An icy blast blew from the Urals; frost lay on the ground; snow flurries were in the air. But none of that deterred the 5,000 or so who turned up for the Tough Guy Challenge, held at Perton, near Wolverhampton recently.
I
Why should that concern you, dear reader? Because one of the brave (some said foolhardy) souls who took part, in the name of charity, was Peter Bolster, an insurance broker with Amlin, who also happens to be our Consultant Editor’s niece’s husband. Pete had first taken part in the challenge 11 years ago, when he was just a bit younger but scarcely any wiser. This year some strange quirk of character moved him to have another go. You would have thought a near-50- year-old, highly respected insurance broker and qualified CII diploma-holder (no less) would have had more sense. The Tough Guy Challenge consists of a cross- country run, interspersed with any number of hugely frightening obstacles - a giant climbing frame, mud slides into icy water, burning straw bales, barbed wire to clamber under, drainage pipes to crawl through, etc, etc - with the sole object of completing the course (and backing various charities). There are no winners in this event - except that they are all winners. The dire winter weather merely added to the sense of achievement in coming through the event unscathed. “Our Pete’ survived, tired, cold (very cold), and a bit bruised, and his chosen charity, a local hospice, benefited greatly. He came away vowing that it was the last time ..... but he said that 11 years ago.
Pete Bolster, muddied but unbowed, with gold medal to prove he was indeed a Tough Guy
Photos: Adrian Susman
8 insurancepeople APRIL 2010
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36