Milliman Launches MG-ALFA in the Cloud

Grazed from MarketWatch. Author: PR Announcement.

Milliman, Inc., the international firm of consultants and actuaries, today announced that MG-ALFA is capable of utilizing Windows Azure for on-demand processing. This represents a major step forward and a valuable feature as insurers look to expand computing capacity while controlling costs.

MG-ALFA Compute for Windows Azure, a proprietary computing component developed by Milliman in collaboration with Microsoft Corp., lets clients take advantage of a variable cost structure and gives them on-demand access to data centers with massive computing capacity. Running MG-ALFA on Windows Azure helps relieve insurers of the planning, management and fixed costs associated with building and maintaining on-site computing resources. Infrastructure, support, maintenance, and monitoring of the grid are all provided by Milliman…

According to Van Beach, MG-ALFA Product Manager, "MG-ALFA Compute for Windows Azure was created from the ground up for high volume actuarial computing. Our pilot companies are routinely running large scale models using 10,000 cores provisioned in six Windows Azure data centers around the globe. This solution provides a scalable and highly available grid environment."

Scott Guthrie, Corporate Vice President, Windows Azure App Platform, from Microsoft says, "We are excited Milliman has chosen Windows Azure, just as it has been using Windows HPC Server since its inception. Moving MG-ALFA to the cloud is a great example of a scalable deployment on the leading edge of computing technology."