The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® '07, SAP's international customer conference, being held in Vienna, Austria, May 14 - 16.

"Our commitment to the co-innovation with partners and customers in the insurance industry is helping best-run businesses such as Swiss Re get even better," said Leo Apotheker, deputy CEO, member of the executive board and president, Global Customer Solutions and Operations, SAP AG. "Our companies share a common aim in the pursuit of excellence: to help Swiss Re take its global success to greater heights on a business process platform that tightly unifies global best practices and quickly enables next practices at the speed of change."

By consolidating its business processes on a single technology platform, Swiss Re aims to achieve greater operational effectiveness and to empower decision makers across the organization with faster access to more reliable information. The initial phase of the global SAP rollout is already under way.

"We needed a solution provider with a clear road map for the long term. We want to significantly reduce the complexity and costs of our existing technology platforms and interfaces, and the related licensing and maintenance fees," said Yury Zaytsev, Group Information Officer and member of the Executive Board of Swiss Re. "SAP emerged as our clear preference for several reasons, not only because of their proven track record of providing successful solutions for global businesses similar to Swiss Re, but also because of the positive experiences we've had with SAP software in some of our regional subsidiaries."

To help optimize return on investment, Swiss Re is leveraging SAP services including SAP Education, which is currently training users on the features of SAP ERP HCM, and SAP Consulting, which will support the ongoing rollouts in Switzerland and the United States.