IBM recently announced a Grid Offering for the Life Insurance Industry. The release states that this offering is to help life insurance clients significantly decrease the time needed to run complex insurance model scenarios. So it appears to be a number crunching horsepower play.Data grids may be a bit passe, but everybody has to start somewhere and if this is the way the hook gets planted in the insurance industry so be it.I do hope that the insurance industry is open to the potential that Grid, and associated technologies that we often name in the same breath as Grid, can bring to what they do. Virtualization, and in particular data virtualization is one such technology.Insurance is a business of data, and the way that data is looked at by different organizations in the same company can be very different. For instance, the way an actuary examines a chunk of data is quite different from the way an adjuster would look at the same chunk. If this data can be virtualized or presented in different ways to those using it, query times can be reduced and more efficient use of the data can be realized.Where the rubber meets the road, or more accurately, where the money meets the bank, I’m going to bet that the mechanism of data virtualization will prove to be more valuable than pure computational horsepower. Right or wrong, I hope to find out. The sooner, the better. Technology Industry