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HASTINGS DIRECT MIGRATES GUIDEWIRE AND OTHER APPLICATIONS TO AZURE VMWARE
SOLUTION, INCREASING PERFORMANCE BY 1.6 TIMES


CUSTOMER DETAILS


CUSTOMER

Hastings Direct


PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

Azure AI Studio
Azure API Management
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Front Door
Azure Kubernetes Service
Azure Machine Learning
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Virtual Desktop
Azure VMware Solution
Microsoft 365 E5
Microsoft Defender for Cloud
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Microsoft Defender for Office 365 P1
Microsoft Sentinel
Power BI
Surface
Windows Server


INDUSTRY

Insurance


ORGANIZATION SIZE

Large (1,000 - 9,999 employees)


COUNTRY

United Kingdom


DOWNLOADS

Hastings Direct Summary Slide



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HASTINGS DIRECT MIGRATES GUIDEWIRE AND OTHER APPLICATIONS TO AZURE VMWARE
SOLUTION, INCREASING PERFORMANCE BY 1.6 TIMES


STORY DETAILS

Print

January 22, 2024



HASTINGS DIRECT IS AN INSURANCE COMPANY THAT PRESENTS 500,000 QUOTES A DAY TO
ROUGHLY 4 MILLION CUSTOMERS FOR HOME AND VEHICLE INSURANCE. THE COMPANY
UNDERTOOK AN INITIATIVE TO TRANSITION TO A CLOUD-FIRST, MODERN WORKPLACE AND WIN
MORE BUSINESS. TO IMPROVE ITS MARKET SHARE AND DELIVER BETTER, FASTER CUSTOMER
JOURNEYS, THE COMPANY MOVED ITS WORKLOADS TO MICROSOFT AZURE VMWARE SOLUTION.
THE COMPANY MIGRATED ONE OF ITS CORE APPLICATIONS, GUIDEWIRE, FROM THEIR
ON-PREMISES DATA CENTER TO RUN ON AZURE VMWARE SOLUTION. BY MIGRATING GUIDEWIRE
AND THEIR ENTIRE DATA CENTER TO AZURE, HASTINGS DIRECT CAN TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE
SCALE, RESILIENCE, AND INNOVATION BENEFITS THAT COME WITH A MODERN
INFRASTRUCTURE. HASTINGS DIRECT INCREASED PERFORMANCE BY 1.6 TIMES AND NOW
HANDLES ADJUSTMENTS 4 AND 5 TIMES FASTER. IT HAS SEEN A CONTINUAL REDUCTION IN
MAJOR INCIDENTS AND POSITIONED ITSELF TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF CLOUD-NATIVE
CAPABILITIES AND INNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES.

> It’s incredible to be executing key processes four and five times faster now.
> We haven’t changed any code—this is purely Azure VMware Solution performance.
> 
> Simon Bullers: Chief Technology Officer
> 
> Hastings Direct


View video:
https://play.vidyard.com/FHTLaZ3yvW29nVWAW8dTXM.jpg

Transcript

(bright music) - At Hastings Direct, we are an insurance broker. We've
predominantly worked through something called an aggregator, which is where
consumers can go to a third party into a website and then ask for insurance
quotes, and that's how we get 90% of our business. It's very important to be at
the top of those sites, both from a competitive perspective and a speed
perspective. We do about 342,000 quotes a day. We need a database with 120,000
IOPS, which is really pushing the boundaries actually of any database. Microsoft
identified a way to bring that SQL server SKU to life. Our system, which is
called Guidewire, it uses Multicast, and Multicast has to be contained inside
the Azure platform where Azure VMware service actually can cope with that
particular challenge, and so that's why we chose it. We're definitely reaping
the benefits of that choice. It's one of the biggest secrets in the Azure
platform, so instead of going to infrastructure as a service just natively, the
fact you can take a VMware workload, migrate it into AVS, and then that opens up
the whole plethora of cloud actually is such a hidden gem. The thing that's
really surprised us is now we've migrated is just the sheer performance. 1.6
times faster than we previously were. The ecosystem benefits that's brought to
us has so much stability, just actually the ability to do more things from an
insurance perspective now we're inside the Azure ecosystem. It's great for our
colleagues, it's great for our customers. We're very excited by the new races in
AI and GPT- and how we can use machine learning, and that really brings new
capability to our business. And we wouldn't be able to do that without the use
of cloud. 100% of our business now runs in the cloud. I think that's a really
major achievement. We went all in, and it's by far the best decision we've ever
made. I was just somewhere yesterday, and somebody said, "Wow, what have you
done to your application "in the last year? "It's really dramatically changed."
And I was like, "We moved to Azure." That was the simple answer.




A PHASED TRANSFORMATION

In the insurance industry, the difference between providing business-winning
quotes and losing a customer often comes down to seconds. Most business for car
insurers in the United Kingdom comes from price comparison website aggregators
that provide insurance rates in a highly commoditized and competitive manner.
Business is driven by fluctuating prices, and insurers have razor-thin windows
of time in which to respond and close.

Hastings Direct understands this well. It presents 500,000 quotes a day for
home, vehicle, and multiple-vehicle insurance to roughly 4 million customers.
The company has the goal of becoming the United Kingdom’s largest insurer and a
strategy to get there. Hastings Direct migrated its workloads to Microsoft Azure
VMware Solution to improve its market share and deliver better, faster customer
journeys for the best possible customer quotes.

Like many insurance and financial services companies, Hastings Direct had long
hosted its workloads via traditional colocation datacenters and in its own
datacenters. The company’s phased transformation—launched in response to its
colocation datacenters reaching end of life—included a culture change to a team
of teams approach, a new colleague workplace experience, a datacenter migration,
a contact center migration, a data enrichment journey, and the deployment of
data analytics and AI solutions.

Although technology played a key role in the company’s approach, so did enabling
its people. Simon Bullers, Chief Technology Officer at Hastings Direct, recalls,
“We knew transformation wouldn’t work without our people onboard. It isn’t just
about the cloud, we had to build the culture, set the vision, and train our
colleagues. Changing the way our colleagues worked was just as important as
changing our technology.” As one of the largest employers in its community,
Hastings Direct felt a duty to empower its current employees to drive its
cloud-first modernized workplace, rather than hiring from elsewhere.

The other secret to the company’s transformational success lies in its
commitment to make the most of Microsoft as an end-to-end technology partner.
“The power of the entire engine of Microsoft came together to help deliver this
outcome,” Bullers says. “Our transformation has worked so well because every
piece of our journey has leveraged the Microsoft ecosystem. When you ask
Microsoft to get engaged, you can make real progress.”


NO CLOUD LEFT BEHIND

Because one of its core applications—insurance industry stalwart Guidewire—had a
multicast networking feature, Hastings Direct needed a cloud solution capable of
handling that functionality. It found its answer in Azure VMware Solution. “We
adopted Azure VMware Solution so that we could bring a legacy application into
the cloud and take advantage of the scale, resilience, and innovation benefits
that come with a modern infrastructure,” says Bullers. “Azure VMware Solution is
the hidden gem inside the Microsoft ecosystem. Instead of moving to IaaS
[infrastructure as a service], you can migrate a VMware workload as is, and
that’s the golden ticket for anyone struggling with their migration.” By moving
its workloads to Azure VMware Solution and running on Windows Server, the
company could also get extended support and security updates for its older
workloads.

Hastings Direct migrated its entire core insurance company platform, including
pricing, its insurance policy record (the core book of record), its claims
center, and its Guidewire-based billing center, to run exclusively on Azure
VMware Solution. For its database, Hastings Direct needed a whopping 120,000
input/output (I/O) operations per second, which necessitated the invention of a
new SQL product—one with the largest I/O operations at that time. “We needed the
fastest database Microsoft had ever built, so we built it,” says Bullers. “It’s
a great example of how Hastings Direct and Microsoft came together to solve a
problem.” Hastings Direct runs this database as a middle-tier SQL Server
environment on Azure infrastructure as a service, which provides the compute
size and performance needed for its databases.

The company uses a host of other Microsoft solutions to propel its business
forward, including:

 * Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) to run its customer journeys.
 * Azure Front Door to manage cloud content delivery for the customer journey
   experiences.
 * Azure API Management to connect its back-end systems with mobile
   applications.
 * Microsoft 365 E5, such as using Power BI to assist with data analysis and
   visualizations.
 * Microsoft-managed Surface devices, supported by Azure Virtual Desktop, for
   each Hastings Direct colleague.
 * Azure Cosmos DB to support Azure-native deployments.
 * Microsoft Sentinel and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Defender for
   Office 365, and Microsoft Defender for Endpoint to help secure the company’s
   environments.
 * Azure Site Recovery for multiple zones in UK South, the region where Hastings
   Direct operates, and UK West.

 

Bullers attributes the company’s ability to get to the cloud so quickly, easily,
and effectively to its adoption of Azure VMware Solution. “We wouldn’t have been
able to move our business without Azure VMware Solution,” says Bullers. “I don’t
think enough companies realize that they can use it to take a legacy environment
and bring it directly to the cloud. So, they’re missing out on the benefits of a
move to Azure.”


ASTOUNDINGLY FAST AND ASSUREDLY FUTURE-READY

By moving a core colocation platform to Azure VMware Solution, Hastings Direct
has seen a significant decline in the number of daily incidents requiring
investigation. Bullers states, “We had 753 major incidents in 2021. After our
migration to Azure VMware Solution, we dropped by 90 percent to just 75 for all
of 2022, and we’re seeing that trend continue in 2023 with the stability of
Azure.”

Hastings Direct has achieved some impressive performance jumps as well, greatly
enhancing its response times to customer policy adjustments. Since the
migration, Hastings Direct colleagues can now execute a midterm adjustment four
times faster than they could before. And if a customer requires a new rate due
to a vehicle change, a process that requires going back to the market,
colleagues can now complete this task five times faster than before. Bullers
says, “It’s incredible to be executing key processes four and five times faster
now. We haven’t changed any code—this is purely Azure VMware Solution
performance.”

The company also accelerated its response times within the high-pressure
insurance aggregator market, which provides a really limited time in which to
respond. Hastings Direct acts 1.6 times faster now than it did with its
colocation datacenter architecture. “We’re seeing performance improvements
everywhere,” says Bullers. “A credit card payment, for example, used to take us
4.8 seconds to process, and now we can do one in a mind-blowing 2.5 seconds. All
told, we’ve increased performance by 1.6 times since our migration to Azure
VMware Solution. And some of our customer journeys are so fast now that they
can’t be discernably measured.”

With this boost in performance, Hastings Direct is poised to become a truly
future-ready, cloud-first company capable of real innovation and market
disruption. “We used Azure VMware Solution to leapfrog to the cloud,” Bullers
states. “Through it, we moved from a legacy environment to our initial cloud
scenario and positioned the company to easily move to a full Azure
implementation with cloud-native capabilities. It’s amazing!”

Hastings Direct is just getting started. With its data in Azure, the company can
now take advantage of Azure Machine Learning and other Azure services to take
the insurance industry into the future. “As we are now 100 percent in the cloud,
if Microsoft releases a product, we can consume it. The new frontier of AI and
GPT and those capabilities gives us the ability to exploit the fact we are now
cloud native,” says Bullers. “We’re just beginning to build out capabilities
around Azure Machine Learning with the Azure OpenAI Service models that have
been launched. We’ll continue to develop and apply that intelligence wherever we
can along our pricing and claiming journeys. It’s exciting!”

Find out more about Hastings Direct on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

> We had 753 major incidents in 2021. After our migration to Azure VMware
> Solution, we dropped by 90 percent to just 75 for all of 2022.
> 
> Simon Bullers: Chief Technology Officer
> 
> Hastings Direct

> We’ve increased performance by 1.6 times since our migration to Azure VMware
> Solution. And some of our customer journeys are so fast now that they can’t be
> discernably measured.
> 
> Simon Bullers: Chief Technology Officer
> 
> Hastings Direct

> We wouldn’t have been able to move our business without Azure VMware Solution.
> I don’t think enough companies realize that they can use it to take a legacy
> environment and bring it directly to the cloud.
> 
> Simon Bullers: Chief Technology Officer
> 
> Hastings Direct

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