Insurer legacy infrastructure modernization

Challenge

The client was a leading U.S. insurance group offering coverage across auto, home, life, business, and health insurance. They built much of their competitive advantage on custom-developed software, but that advantage was increasingly weighed down by the cost of running it. A large portfolio of business-critical Java applications ran on a shared application server environment that was expensive to implement and operate.

That cost wasn’t just a budget line item: production outages on that platform directly affected the customer experience and the bottom line. On top of that, the insurer needed to be able to deliver new business functionality faster, without a corresponding increase in cost, a bind familiar to any enterprise IT team trying to modernize while still keeping the business running.

To close that gap without slowing business operations, Flexion joined the project as an embedded partner, rather than an outside vendor, to help modernize the platform from within.

Approach

The insurer launched an internal Infrastructure Lifecycle Program (ILP) to rethink how IT infrastructure was delivered to the business. Flexion teamed up with their own staff and other contract partners to lead that rebuild.

The work started with the architecture itself. Flexion played a central role in specifying and implementing a new application server infrastructure built on open-source JBoss Application Server running on standardized, commodity hardware. The decision was strategic as well as technical. By moving away from costly, proprietary licensing toward an open, vendor-neutral foundation, the insurer gained more control over its own cost structure going forward.

But the technology was only one part of the transition. Flexion trained the insurer’s existing staff on best practices for operating the new environment, helping keep that capability in-house rather than creating an ongoing dependence on outside support. We also developed repeatable best practices for migrating applications to the new platform and worked directly alongside application teams to carry out those migrations.

As issues surfaced across a wide range of applications, Flexion stayed involved with hands-on diagnostic and performance troubleshooting to keep the transition moving. We also built internal tools that allowed operations and development staff to pull infrastructure information directly instead of relying on a central support team for routine requests. It was a small change with a practical impact: internal teams gained more autonomy and spent less time waiting for the information they needed.

Outcomes

The impact showed up across every measure that mattered: performance, availability, implementation and licensing costs, maintenance costs, and operational simplicity. Across each of these areas, the new platform outperformed the environment it replaced. The results gave the insurer the confidence to go further. The organization committed to migrating all of its existing Java-based applications to the new platform, approximately 300 business-critical applications in total.

The financial impact was substantial. We helped the insurer save more than $10 million, eliminating the previous hardware and licensing model alone.