SAP and EMC Corporation have announced an extension of their global strategic alliance which includes a reseller relationship, deeper technology integrations, and joint sales and marketing activities.

Under the agreement, SAP will resell newly developed solutions – leveraging EMC Documentum enterprise content management, EMC Captiva intelligent enterprise capture and EMC Document Sciences customer communications management – beginning with SAP Insurance Broker Statement Processing by EMC.

The solution is planned to be available in the third quarter of 2010 and will be offered as part of SAP's portfolio for the insurance industry. Additional solutions for the banking industry are planned to be available in quick succession.

The companies say it will allow banks and insurers to improve process efficiency, cost control and customer loyalty by integrating with other systems to collect existing structured and unstructured data, capturing paper-based content digitally and delivering a rich, highly personalized customer experience.

SAP and EMC will collaborate on building solutions to provide a new avenue for financial firms to solve many of their process-based challenges by adding capabilities to support the most effective use of all enterprise information resources.

One example is to eliminate the manual effort traditionally required for the insurance broker reconciliation process. By providing the digital capture of broker documents, e-mails and faxes into the reconciliation process, insurance brokers can increase their productivity and reduce the cost of errors and manual workarounds.

Another example is to address the problem of time-consuming paper handling and manual intensive processes required to manage a loan.