Judy Johnson to Head New Sapiens Insurance Practice

Sapiens International Corp. (London) has launched a North American insurance solutions practice headed by former META Group vice president of insurance strategy Judy Johnson, who will lead the practice as vice president of insurance strategy, Sapiens Americas.

The practice will initially focus on the property and casualty market by offering modular, Web-enabled business solutions. According to Johnson, her role in directing the endeavor will be two fold. "Part of my job is to help Sapiens craft its solutions and services offerings to meet the needs of the marketplace. Sapiens has an underlying technology platform, intellectual property, and certainly, a world-class delivery capability," she says. "Since they've decided to focus on the insurance industry, they need somebody like me to pull it all together.

"My other role is to continue to provide some level of thought leadership to the industry and the various sets of industry players, as opposed to simply being a company mouthpiece," Johnson adds. She and her new colleagues agree, she continues, "that in order for me to be effective in my role, I need to be able to remain somewhat agnostic in terms of consulting to the industry, serving the industry, as opposed to being totally heads down."

Sapiens is currently building a family of solutions called "Sapiens Insight," designed to address the policy and claims administration needs, along with the channel integration challenges faced by the industry, and other areas. "It is basically a solution set that provides a framework to help companies craft customized policy and processing solutions," says Johnson.

Johnson will work closely with Larry Goldberg, senior vice president, Sapiens Americas, and will be supported by other members of the Insurance Practice, namely Raj Vaswani, director of insurance solutions, and Susan Schultz, senior business analyst, according to a Sapiens source.

Goldberg describes the new relationship with Johnson as "a very exciting acquisition" for Sapiens. "Judy brings very strong knowledge and a unique point of view to our practice and enables us to understand and better meet our customers' needs. Her contribution is essential for us to bring in-depth and broad, well-focused knowledge into our practice," he says. "Judy fits very well with us in terms of temperament, and in terms of having-strong minded, strong-willed intelligence, and she brings a lot of life to the practice."

For her part, Johnson admitted to having received a number of offers to join other companies. However, she quips, "it's not every corporation where someone like me could fit in well, culturally and personality-wise-Sapiens is definitely one of those places," she says. "I really think this is a great group of people and I think the company has a great future serving the industry."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio