By using Nutanix, Berkley Insurance Australia helps its underwriters, claims managers, and supporting workforce deliver better services to clients.
Berkley Insurance Australia (BIA) is an award-winning specialist insurance provider, offering customised solutions across a range of specialist product lines to brokers and their clients. By using Nutanix, BIA seeks to safeguard the high performance of its mission critical underwriting and claims system, while making it easier to administer and scalable to handle peak workloads. The Nutanix platform also helps to drive innovation, support a broker portal, and free up time for the IT team to focus on cyber security initiatives.
Key Results
| Award-winning performance | Driving business change | Lowering costs and energy use |
|---|---|---|
| Delivers high performance to achieve best-in-class levels of service to customers. | Supports business growth but without a corresponding increase in IT costs | Consolidated hardware by 50%, cutting IT power consumption |
Speed and performance are non-negotiables for me. With Nutanix, everything is sized and has capacity for our busiest time of year. Even if we’re hit with an unknown peak, nothing ever comes close to the demand we see at end-of-financial year.
Challenge
BIA’s expertise and commitment to personalized service make them a trusted choice for brokers seeking comprehensive insurance solutions for their clients. Already known for the efficiency of its services, BIA introduced its underwriting and claims system in 2014 to respond quicker to brokers and maximize business volumes.
As BIA grew and the demands on its underwriting system increased, the business looked to streamline management of the system’s underlying infrastructure. It also wanted to create a more flexible platform, so the regional IT team didn’t worry about performance issues at the end of the financial year when the system can be supporting tens-of-thousands of enquires every week. Jamie Rojas, IT infrastructure manager Berkley Asia Pacific Services says, “Our underwriting system is an important part of our business. My role is to ensure IT isn’t a bottleneck to the business, so when we identified the emerging risk that our old system] may not support future business needs, we went to market for something simpler to manage, more resilient, while also improving performance.”
Solution
BIA moved their systems from its legacy three-tier infrastructure over to Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), to reduce administration tasks and boost scalability.
Recently, BIA renewed its Nutanix infrastructure, to retain best-in-class performance. BIA also leverages Nutanix to support its latest innovation, called bindIT, a broker-facing portal. Rojas explains “The reporting side of bindIT feeds into Nutanix to give it the scalability and reliable performance we need.”
Customer Outcomes
Award-winning performance
As a result of BIA adopting Nutanix, underwriters and claims managers can deliver great levels of service to brokers and their clients year-round, without worrying about workload performance during peak seasons. The reliability and performance of BIA’s underwriting system on Nutanix has paid off, with BIA achieving five industry Insurer of the Year titles over multiple years thanks to the quality of service it maintains. What’s more, with developments such as bindIT helping to up its game BIA is looking forward to continued success.
Driving growth without rising costs
The simplicity of Nutanix has allowed BIA to expand and handle higher business volumes without a corresponding increase in IT management costs. The Regional IT team has achieved this through Nutanix Prism, which enables one-click upgrades and self-healing to reduce the amount of administration that is required. According to Rojas, “With a single pane of glass over the infrastructure environment and one-click upgrades, Nutanix is relieving us from extensive infrastructure management. We’re now focusing efforts on strategic projects for the business.”
More time for innovation and strategic projects
Nutanix has freed up resources for BIA to redeploy to innovation and strengthen its security posture as the threat landscape evolves. Rojas says “Cyber security has become our number one priority. It’s great that Nutanix has released IT headcount to be able to prioritize the hardening of BIA’s Security initiatives.”
Lowering power usage, consolidating hardware 50%
Besides helping improve security posture, Nutanix has enabled BIA to lower power usage. By not needing a three-tier infrastructure, BIA with the help of NCI were able to cut the number of racks in its primary data center by 50 percent.
Reducing the IT burden
The move to Nutanix has been good for BIA. Rojas no longer worries about systems going down in the middle of the night and tackling a flurry of emails from stakeholders. Thanks to the automation in NCI that gets systems back up and running within minutes of a failure, he can sleep better. “I like knowing that I’m not going to wake up to emergencies” Rojas says.
Next Steps
As for the future, Rojas and his team plan to continue strengthening BIA’s security against threats like ransomware and look for other developments to support business growth.
Learn more at www.nutanix.com
Partner
Datacom is Australasia's largest homegrown tech company. It brings together technology and expertise to deliver sustainable solutions for some of New Zealand and Australia's largest and most successful corporations.
