IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that NOVIS, a growing European insurance company, has adopted IBM Cloud to help accelerate its international expansion, streamline business processes and gain efficiencies with innovation in a secured environment. NOVIS runs its IT systems on IBM Cloud in all branches across ten European countries. 

NOVIS Insurance Company Inc. was established with international capital and is headquartered in Bratislava, Slovakia. Currently NOVIS operates in Austria, Germany, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Finland. In 2017, the company launched its operations in Italy and in the beginning of 2018 in Sweden and Iceland. 

"From the very beginning, we truly believed that introducing genuinely new and innovative financial products can best be achieved through the establishment of a new company focused on such products," says Siegfried Fatzi, general manager, NOVIS Insurance Company.

NOVIS is focused on delivering innovative services to its clients. Its concept includes more than 25 innovative insurance offerings previously unavailable on the market. They are neatly organized into five equally important pillars represented in the NOVIS Pentagon of Innovations, including new forms of savings, wide insurance coverage, new ways of using capital, expanded flexibility and liquidity. 

As the insurance company has grown and it began its rapid expansion across European markets, it turned to agile business processes and started to seek for flexible IT infrastructure models. New generations of clients using mobile technologies and social networks in their daily lives demand customer-focused enterprises, increased flexibility and optimized multi-channel interactions with minimized risk. 

With plans to expand its insurance service to other countries and offer it worldwide, NOVIS needed a highly reliable, flexible and secured cloud infrastructure to grow with its business. It therefore decided to move fully into IBM Cloud with VMware virtualization - all used as a service. 

"For us as an innovative insurance company, cloud computing offers the potential for significant improvements. It helps us transform and optimize operations, improve governance and transparency, and expand business agility and capability. At the same time, we wanted to run our enterprise systems in a cloud environment with no increase of the cost if our cloud consumption is constant and unmodified. When we compared the performance of our enterprise systems on cloud services from several providers, the IBM Cloud came out on top," says Siegfried Fatzi, general manager, NOVIS Insurance Company. 

"NOVIS is just one of the real examples of how IBM can help clients deploy their ideas to global markets with speed, scalability and elasticity," said Zuzana Kocmanikova, country general manager, IBM Czech Republic and Slovakia. 

IBM Cloud is accelerating digital transformation across the global insurance industry by providing a secured platform for creating new business value through services such as analytics, artificial intelligence and blockchain. Today's announcement builds on IBM's recent announcement that German private insurers joined IBM and the country's largest statutory health insurer to offer electronic health records to 17.5M clients on the IBM Cloud.