The program is designed to provide ISVs with technical and marketing support to meet the specific information technology needs of small and medium business (SMB) customers.

Spokesperson for FINEOS Australia, Shane O'Brien said the recruitment will be of benefit to local insurance companies and local business.

"Most of the local insurers use significant IBM hardware and software and we work closely with IBM locally around existing and potential customers," he said."The main immediate benefit of the extended partnership is that it provides us with richer functionality, detail, and access to resources in areas like scalability testing, development support and compliance."

O'Brien said it is important to the large insurance carriers that any solutions they look to implement are optimized to support their hardware requirements, volumes of users, and insurance application requirements.

So far there are three local clients that have deployed FINEOS and are running it on WebSphere. Two of these use IBM hardware, and one uses DB2 as the database.