ISV Improves Service Levels and Reduces Cost of Delivering Software As a Service

Microsoft Customer Solution
Service Provider Solutions Case Study
/ / ISV Improves Service Levels and Reduces Cost of Delivering Software as a Service
Overview
Country: United States
Industry: Information Technology
Customer Profile
Vertafore provides software and services to insurance agents, brokers, carriers, banks, managing general agencies, and other distributors of insurance and financial services.
Business Situation
Vertafore needed a way to manage its expanding server farm more effectively and cost-efficiently.
Solution
Vertafore chose to deploy an integrated set of management and application hosting tools from the Microsoft® Solution for Windows®-based Hosting.
Benefits
n  Reduced alert notification times to seconds
n  Resolve problems 30-50 times faster than previously
n  Install security updates to all servers in as little as 15 minutes
n  Build new servers 7.5 times faster than previously / “We’ll know early on if a server has a problem, and we can then fix that problem before the server stops and the customer loses access to our application. That’s key for customer satisfaction.”
Dominique Laborde, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Vertafore
Vertafore had begun offering its flagship insurance software as an online service, and more and more customers were moving away from running the software locally and taking advantage of the service. But as the Vertafore data center expanded toward 300 Microsoft® Windows®–based server computers, administrators found themselves stretched to maintain and ensure the performance of the servers. Looking for a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage its online offering, Vertafore turned to the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting. The solution offers centralized monitoring, reporting, and server software update management, helping administrators monitor and manage the expanding server farm more efficiently. The solution also will help save thousands of dollars in overhead and ensure more rapid recovery in the event of a disaster.

Situation

The AMS Services division of Vertafore offers policy rating and management software for insurance professionals. Some Vertafore customers run the software on their own hardware and in their own offices, but thousands rely on Vertafore to deliver the software as a hosted service. These clients depend on Vertafore to keep these critical business systems up and running, and to ensure that the databases housing their policies and user records remain available and uncompromised.

Yet with more than 275 Microsoft® Windows®–based server computers on the data center floor as of the end of 2004, Vertafore system administrators were finding it ever more difficult to monitor and maintain the environment. The data center was growing by an average of nine servers per month, and building those servers manually required 12 to 15 hours of an administrator’s time each month. Adding application and security updates to so many servers was also taking more and more time. As for monitoring the servers and ensuring application performance levels, administrators had eight different monitoring consoles to watch, and sometimes they still found themselves getting calls about servers running slowly.

Vertafore wanted to find a way to run its data center more efficiently and cost-effectively. It needed a way to build and update servers quickly. It needed monitoring and reporting tools that would keep track of a broader range of conditions and provide faster alerts to administrators.

Solution

Microsoft and eQuest Technologies showed Vertafore how it could improve service delivery, increase operational efficiency, and save thousands of dollars in operating costs on an ongoing basis through use of the Microsoft® Solution for Windows®-based Hosting version 3.0. The solution also could help the company rebuild its growing server farm more quickly than ever in the event that its data center suffered a catastrophic disaster.

The Solution for Windows-based Hosting provides a centralized and automated management infrastructure to help independent software vendors (ISVs) improve service levels, reduce costs, and increase margins. Tested and supported by Microsoft, the solution provides best practices, tools, scripts, and code samples to help Vertafore efficiently deploy and operate its hosted software offerings on the Windows operating system. The solution’s integrated modules offer substantial flexibility, ensuring that an ISV can deploy precisely the modules that it needs to meet its specific business needs. Vertafore is using the following solution modules:

n  Server purposing

n  Monitoring and reporting

n  Service provisioning

n  Update management

n  Web hosting

n  Data hosting

The solution modules have been designed to integrate quickly and easily into existing infrastructures, preserving investments while enabling creation of a hosting environment that provides the flexibility and differentiation that ISVs require.

The critical environment that Vertafore has to manage includes nearly 300 Windows-based server computers. The company’s latest hosted service is a Microsoft .NET–connected application called AMS 360. It uses the Microsoft .NET Framework, an integral component of the Windows operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart client applications. AMS 360 uses a smart client front end and a back-end server component built on Web services. The hosted back-end portion of the solution relies on more than 35 HP ProLiant servers running the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system.

New Vertafore customers are starting on AMS 360, but there are still thousands of customers that continue to make use of an older application called AMS for Windows. This hosted solution consists of a Microsoft Windows NT® Server operating system version 4.0 domain with 19 active/passive clusters running Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, 6 Web servers running Windows 2000 Server, and more than 180 servers running Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server. There are also 6 Windows NT 4.0 domain controllers.

The hardware for all services resides in a single data center in College Station, Texas.

Benefits

With the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting, Vertafore has gained the capabilities that it needs to run its data center more efficiently and cost-effectively. Using the Monitoring and Reporting module of the solution, Vertafore can now track many more hardware and performance parameters than it previously could, and administrators get alerts and warnings much sooner than they did with the old collection of monitoring tools. Administrators can also resolve problems more quickly using the solution’s monitoring tools—so quickly, in fact, that customers may not even know that a server had a problem. Vertafore administrators can manage security updates much more efficiently using the Update Management module of the solution, and they can build new servers faster than ever using the Server Purposing module. In fact, the Server Purposing capabilities are so strong that Vertafore could completely rebuild its data center within hours of a catastrophic event—ensuring that all customers would have their data and applications available well within the time specified in their service level agreements (SLAs).

Detecting and Resolving Problems 30 Times Faster

Vertafore previously monitored only some 70 conditions, gathering data using eight different consoles within the network operations center. It could take an unacceptably long time for an administrator to become aware of an underperforming server. Indeed, sometimes a customer would call with a question about a server before the monitoring tools alerted administrators to a problem.

Using the Monitoring and Reporting module of the solution, which makes use of Microsoft Operations Manager (MOM) 2005 and monitors more than 9,000 conditions upon deployment, Vertafore administrators begin receiving alert messages within seconds of a server event. Moreover, where it could have taken Vertafore administrators two hours or more to fix a detected problem through manual intervention, the automated features of MOM often fix the problem within minutes—a thirtyfold improvement over its previous monitoring response. Vertafore now responds so quickly to a variety of conditions that customers often never know that a server has a problem.

“MOM helped us find issues in our network that we didn’t even know we had,” says Chris Munoz, Vice President of Hosting Services at Vertafore. “We’re able to cast a much bigger net than we could before. In fact, on the first day we ran MOM, we found 33 critical events that we hadn’t even known about—we had simply never monitored for them before.”

Munoz also calculates that MOM will help Vertafore close trouble tickets much faster than it previously could, saving the company more than $16,000 per year.

“This solution is really going to help us enhance uptime to our customers,” says Dominique Laborde, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Vertafore. “We’ll know early on if a server has a problem, and we can then fix that problem before the server stops and the customer loses access to our application. That’s key for customer satisfaction.”

Installing Software Updates 4 Times Faster

Vertafore administrators install an average of 1.5 application changes per month, as well as 1.5 application deployments. They also average 3.33 security updates per month. Managing more than 6 updates per month for a single server computer may not sound like a daunting task, but Vertafore has nearly 300 servers in its data center, and managing updates had grown to be a significant challenge for administrators.

Using the Update Management module of the solution, which employs Microsoft Systems Management Server 2003 (SMS) and Software Update Services, Vertafore has significantly reduced the amount of time that it takes an administrator to update server computers. Working with eQuest, Vertafore compared the time that it took to install updates on its servers using both its traditional manual approach and the new automated approach. The manual process of updating servers took more than 28 hours per month; with SMS, that process takes less than 7 hours per month—a 75 percent reduction in administrator time.

“Systems Management Server allows us to update 200 servers with no more effort than it takes to update a single server,” says Munoz. “This results in an estimated yearly savings of more than $13,000, even when considering the licensing costs of SMS.”

Building Servers At Least 7 Times Faster

In the past, Vertafore administrators built server computers manually. An administrator would install operating system software from a CD or from an operating system image built using Norton Ghost. Once the operating system was installed, the administrator then had to perform many manual tasks to complete the build and ensure that the server was ready for production.

Manually, the process of building a single Windows Server 2003–based server could take as long as 111 minutes—if installation tasks could be performed without interruption (more often, it would take an elapsed time of between three and four hours to build a single server). By moving back and forth between machines, an engineer could save some time and build two servers in 151 minutes. Over the course of a month, administrators routinely spent 12 to 15 hours building new servers.

After eQuest deployed the Server Purposing module of the solution, which utilizes the Automated Deployment Services (ADS) of Windows Server 2003, Vertafore discovered that it could build a complete server in less than 15 minutes—7.4 times faster than its typical manual build time. Moreover, because Vertafore can use ADS to build multiple servers in parallel, Vertafore administrators can build all the servers that they need to add each month in the same 14.81 minutes that it takes to build a single server. The automated capabilities free up many hours of an administrator’s time each month and enable the administrator to focus his or her attention on value-added projects that might otherwise take a back seat to server building.

Preparing for Catastrophe

Vertafore has also discovered an additional benefit of the Solution. The server purposing module provides Vertafore with all the capabilities it needs to rebuild its server farm even faster than its SLAs require it to do so in the event of a catastrophic event.

If for some reason the College Station data center were to fail, Vertafore has promised its customers that their data and systems would be back online quickly. To ensure that promise, Vertafore maintains a “warm backup” data center in a separate location. Given the rate at which its production data center had been growing, though, Vertafore managers found themselves wondering whether administrators could bring the warm backup data center online within the time frame defined by the SLA. As the number of server computers in the production data center creeps past 300, rebuilding those servers by hand in the backup data center might require an unacceptably long time.

Using the multicast purposing capabilities of the solution, however, Vertafore has discovered that it could easily rebuild all systems in its data center within the time specified by its SLA and get its customers back up and running quickly.

Ensuring the Insurer’s Systems

With the Microsoft Solution for Windows-based Hosting, Vertafore is in a strong position to ensure the ongoing cost-effective delivery of its hosted software solutions—which in turn ensures the data integrity and back office operations of its thousands of insurance agency customers. The Solution enables Vertafore to improve the delivery of its service—and its profitability—on an everyday basis. The Solution also ensures that Vertafore can meet its SLAs, even in the face of disaster.


Microsoft Windows Server System and the Communications Sector

Microsoft® Windows Server System™ is a comprehensive, integrated, and interoperable server infrastructure that helps reduce the complexity and costs of building, deploying, connecting, and operating agile business solutions. Windows Server System helps service providers create new value for their businesses and their customers through the strategic use of their IT assets. With the Windows Server operating system as its foundation, Windows Server System delivers dependable infrastructure for data management and analysis; enterprise integration; customer, partner, and employee portals; business process automation; communications and collaboration; and core IT operations including security, deployment, and systems management.
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