MARLBOROUGH, MA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/29/13 -- OneShield, Inc., a global provider of flexible, enterprise class and content-rich policy and billing core systems for property/casualty (P&C) insurers, is pleased to announce the expansion of its cloud services. Dragon Cloud will directly benefit insurance customers looking to lower their total cost of ownership (TCO) and increase flexibility for deploying and offering applications and services.

"The insurance industry has begun to embrace cloud capabilities for non-core services, and we expect this to expand to core services as well," said Karen Furtado, partner, SMA Strategy Meets Action. "In fact, in a recent survey, more than 45 percent of insurers are evaluating or implementing core systems utilizing cloud services. Private cloud or a hybrid model, which is a cross between public/private, is an excellent point-of-entry for insurance companies that need the flexibility cloud offers, but want to ensure the privacy and security of their data."

Dragon Cloud extends the full capabilities of OneShield's flagship offering, OneShield Dragon® (Dragon), to the cloud with the option of a private cloud or hybrid cloud approach. Dragon includes Dragon Policy, Dragon Billing, Dragon Rating and Dragon Intelligence, and is a proven industry solution in production across a combined 43 commercial, personal and specialty lines of business.

OneShield's Dragon Cloud features include:

• Shared infrastructure to take advantage of cost efficiencies with dedicated OneShield Dragon® instance;
• Expert Dragon support services for complete flexibility and security;
• Complete oversight and management of the customer's environments;
• Flexible pricing models to best meet the customer's needs;
• Customer control over when upgrades are accepted in the production environment;
• Access to Dragon's core content and workflows which help to facilitate rapid implementation; and
• Outsourced maintenance, development and configuration services.

"We recognize the importance of flexibility for our customers and that is why we have been offering cloud capabilities for more than six years with seven customers in production. Our customers provide commercial and personal products, but many now compete in specialty markets and Dragon Cloud has enabled them to cost effectively expand into these new markets quickly," said Glenn Anschutz, president and CEO at OneShield.

"With the growing demand for these capabilities in the industry, we are increasing our focus in this area and expanding our cloud-based services to provide even more benefits to our customers," said Tim Steele, SVP of US Sales at OneShield. "Cloud has the potential of helping customers significantly lower their total cost of ownership based on its shared infrastructure model and OneShield offers an approach that delivers the highest level of privacy and security while easing the burden of infrastructure demands."

Dragon Cloud leverages the flexibility of Dragon's configuration tool set, allowing for a more custom application to roll out new products than the traditional Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) approach.

About Strategy Meets Action
Exclusively servicing the insurance industry, SMA is a strategic advisory firm offering a unique blend of research, advisory, and consulting services to insurance companies and IT solution providers. By leveraging best practices from both management consulting and research advisory disciplines, SMA's advisory service offerings are actionable, business driven, and research based -- where strategy meets action. For more information about SMA, please visit the company's website at www.strategymeetsaction.com.

About OneShield
OneShield delivers flexible, enterprise-class policy management, billing, rating, product configuration and business intelligence/analytic solutions to the global P&C/General Insurance industry. Based on an open, tool-based architecture, OneShield Dragon® provides companies with the ability to streamline product creation, management, underwriting and distribution. With Dragon, P&C/General insurers gain a competitive advantage that helps them improve operations and profitability while meeting increasing customer and market demands. OneShield Dragon® is a proven industry solution in production across a combined 43 commercial, personal and specialty lines of business. OneShield develops innovative technology to better serve the needs of the industry and more importantly, their customers. OneShield is headquartered in Marlborough, MA and has an office in Gurgaon, India. Visit oneshield.com to learn more, or for further information contact Kim Morton :: 774-348-1051 :: kimorton@oneshield.com