Thunderhead Receives 2011 XCelent Award

Thunderhead recognized by Celent for technology and customer service capabilities

October 21, 2011

Thunderhead, the company that builds loyalty and profitability by optimizing customer engagement, today announced that Thunderhead NOW has been named the winner of the XCelent Service Award by Celent in its recent report, “Document Automation: Solution Vendors for Insurers 2011.” Authored by Nicolas Michellod, Senior Analyst in Celent’s insurance practice, the report evaluated ten different document automation systems used by insurers and rated each solution based on technology, breadth of functionality, customer base and depth of service.

Celent defines document automation as, at a minimum, a system that allows the automatic generation of a document or documents from a managed template with both variable data and business rules. Document automation solutions generally provide an array of features, including a WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) interface for designing templates, both ad hoc and batch capability, componentized documents, a commitment to SOA and various insurance-specific interfaces.

As part of the evaluation, Thunderhead was recognized by Celent for its exceptional customer service based on the company’s insurance customer references. Celent surveyed Thunderhead’s insurance clients to rate Thunderhead’s implementation capabilities in seven areas, including: responsiveness, project management, on-time implementation, on-budget implementation, overall project success, business knowledge and document conversion process capabilities. The reference customers gave Thunderhead an average rating of 5 for 5 on each of the criteria, making Thunderhead the only vendor in the report to earn a perfect score across the board.

According to Celent, “Thunderhead is a young company that has already managed to acquire a strong insurance client base. With almost 25 new insurance clients since January 2009, the company is experiencing great success with clients not only satisfied with the product but also with all aspects related to its implementation, and we would not be surprised to see the company carrying on its success going forward.”

Thunderhead NOW is a single enterprise platform designed to handle all modes (batch, interactive, real time and process-driven) of business communications across all communications channels. The platform is based entirely on open standards with an XML core and has no proprietary engines, proprietary languages or interfaces in its architecture. It is business-user driven with a simple, comprehensive template design environment that reduces organizational complexity and bottlenecks. Thunderhead NOW provides multichannel capabilities and enables the use of XML for content, rules and resources to provide dynamic support for all channels, including print, email, web, fax or text.

The report notes that Thunderhead’s clients “particularly appreciate Thunderhead’s commitment to XML standard, shared content reducing the object required to build documents and multichannel capabilities from a single template.” Thunderhead customers also “like the open architecture, the system performance and Thunderhead’s staff attitude.”