Chennai: India''''s second largest non-life insurer, United India, has selected Siris 4 core insurance solution, part of a package offered by Hewlett Packard to United India Insurance in a Rs100-crore deal for seven years.

"The share of hardware will be Rs70 crore and the balance is for software, maintenance and others," remarked Raju Sharan, financial advisor, United India Insurance.

Included in the consortium led by Hewlett Packard is Newgen''''s document management solution.

The consortium would also set up a 24x7 help desk to assist the insurer to solve any technical glitch.

At the end of the seventh year, Hewlett Packard would hand over the solution to United India.

"As per the deal, we will implement SAP ERP platform for enterprise-wide financial accounting and human capital management solution," said Balu Doraisamy, managing director, Hewlett Packard.

The complete implementation is based on Microsoft technology on SQL servers and .NET framework.

According to G Srinivasan, chairman cum managing director, the new solution is expected to change the way in which the non-life insurer transacts business now and minimise chances of fraud and reduce the transaction costs for the company.

The pilot phase is expected to start sometime next September and by the end of 2008 the whole system is expected to go live, remarked Srinivasan.

To start with the insurer will test the new solution in couple of branches on one or two product lines.

According to him, the new solution is expected to relieve some employees from the back office work for redeployment.

United India Insurance will also have a disaster recovery centre in Hyderabad.

Speaking about the status of the Boston Consulting Group''''s (BCG) report for reengineering the company''''s operations, Srinivasan said, "The first report is expected before December end. This will be discussed with other stakeholder groups like the employees before the measures suggested by BCG are implemented."