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Posted on 04 Sep 02
Veteran industry sales professional Barry Klein, host of the Internet Resource http://www.ultimateinsurancelinks.com has joined ebix.com (formerly Delphi) in a senior position. As Barry put it, "Officially, my title is Director, ebixExchange. Unofficially, my job description is "selling stuff to insurance companies". ‘Stuff’, to me, has always been a technical term, and I’ll also be selling stuff to other vendors, too"
There was an office press release issued, however I think Barry’s letter to his friends better explains his new position.
Dear Friends,
Ebix, which started originally as Delphi Systems, is one of the oldest of the agency management systems. It’s a public company, trading (NASDAQ) under the cleverly named stock symbol of "ebix", and just reported its Q2 earnings (making 7 out of 8 profitable quarters, and it is profitable without debt). Originally, Delphi specialized in larger systems for bigger brokers, and bought up the McCracken (Infinity) and InsureNet systems which were also used by big shops. They also picked up the very large Redshaw (remember Rob Thompson?) system as well as Mountain States (remember Brenda & Phil Frandsen?). Over the years, they’ve accumulated a very large customer base of agencies using their various legacy agency management systems. I’m not involved with their agency management system operations, directly, but it’s relevant to my new position."
"Well, a couple of years ago they started building an entirely new agency management system, on an ASP basis, written directly for the web and not using Citrix. Big development job, and they originally outsourced some of it to a development company in India. It went so well that ebix set up its own shop in India. Today, ebix owns its own four-story building in Delhi, with over half of the corporate employees there. Once the initial development was done, and the product now released, ebix expanded to add a large telemarketing operation in India, calling agencies and doing the initial sales calls and setting up demos (at a prodigious rate, incidentally). So, now ebix has both a large programming staff and a large telemarketing staff in India, with all the related management, hardware, phone systems, etc. All related to insurance, and all perfect for insurance outsourcing opportunities.
Because of both the large existing customer base and the growing ebixASP customer base, ebix built a strong conversion tool for its own use, called ebixExchange. It does the kind of ‘any-to-any’ conversions that the old BWC Keylink (now IVANS Transformation Express) product did. So ebix will now be offering data conversions to carriers, at highly competitive rates. Along the way, ebix also bought the original company that competed with IVANS on download/upload, Ins-Site (originally AT&T Inview), and so ebix can now compete for download (primarily) business at rates that are literally a fraction of IVANS’ costs. ebix already handles virtually every major agency management system, including Applied Systems and the various AMS systems.
So, bottom line, here are the products and services ebix has to offer to carriers and other vendors:
Data conversions, on either an individual project basis on an ongoing process basis. We’ll structure either a fixed price or fixed rate deal.
Download (for agency-based carriers), at a rate of 50% or less of the IVANS rate. Guaranteed. Regardless of how good a deal a carrier thinks it has with IVANS, we’ll do it for half, or less. Just send us your IVANS bill, and let us quote it. Contract programming, on an outsourced basis. We’ll structure either a guaranteed fixed price contract (based on an agreed-upon Statement of Work), or a panel of programmers at a fixed monthly cost. Our price includes all management, benefits, hardware, phone lines, taxes, everything.
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