Background
Insureon is the number one independent marketplace for online delivery of small business insurance. With a unique talent for blending tech and insurance expertise, the company offers streamlined application processes and lightning fast results. Headquartered in Chicago, Insureon serves a variety of industries, from IT and other industry professionals to independent contractors to restaurants and other retail establishments. Insureon also licenses its software applications to agencies and enterprise partners looking to serve their own clients more effectively.
The Challenge
Insureon’s legacy monolithic architecture had served them well, up to a point. Deployments were challenging, software was brittle, and the company required a more fluid solution to keep up with rapid growth. “We were experiencing prohibitive performance and challenges in terms of code complexity that are introduced during company and systems growth. The goal was to improve our deployments and to standardize on one common platform that would provide flexibility and at the same time allow us to easily train and build the team around it,” said Yuri Ter-Saakyants, CTO.
Consumers want information and results in realtime. With a focus on providing prompt, reliable quotes, Insureon needed a system that was more powerful, yet minimal, and highly optimized.
The Solution
During the discovery phase, the Insureon team reviewed multiple possible solutions, but the one that really stood out was a database architecture where information is stored as a stream of immutable events over time, rather than simply storing current state. This allows for improved business intelligence, increased observability, perfect audit trails, and the ability to perform root cause analyses. After evaluating several vendors and alternatives, it was evident that Event Store was the clear winner. “Event Store’s ES provided the performance, semantics, and multiple event transactional capabilities that we needed,” said Aaron Hanna, Chief Architect.
Key Benefits
- A distinct competitive advantage
- Complete historical records
- Improved business intelligence and agility
- Increased speed and scale
- A central source of truth
A Distinct Competitive Advantage
With ES, problems can be viewed from a multitude of perspectives, and this clarity provides a distinct competitive advantage. Insureon can now ask questions such as, “what is the average time to quote for certain carriers? What’s the attrition of an application? What’s the correlation between this process and that data response?” Everything is correlated and can be drawn upon through ES to build a complete multi-dimensional picture.
Complete Historical Records
In the insurance industry, it’s important to keep a complete history of changes. From current state to changes over time, those answers are built right into Insureon’s software. The Insureon team can now visit historical data points, such as what their client liked last month vs. six months ago. Changes over time, correlations between processes, and the ability to roll back certain states are powerful tools for improving the customer experience. “We now can time travel through the system and perform root cause analyses,” said Vitaly Galinsky, Systems Architect.
Improved Business Intelligence and Agility
It can be a challenge to make intelligent business decisions without having a complete picture of what is transpiring within your system - what happened, when did it happen, to whom did it happen, and what was that event’s relationship to other events. Insureon can now entertain almost any possibility, direction, or configuration, which has dramatically increased business creativity and agility.
Increased Speed and Scale
“In the new digital world, we are generating tremendous amounts of data. ES has allowed us to manage and understand these large quantities without losing agility and scalability. It has enabled us to perform asynchronous tasks on datasets, speeding up our consumption of data, and allowing our organization to glean new insight into our business,” said Rohit Harshvardhan, Technical Team Lead. Insureon now has the KPIs and insights necessary to see everything that happens, how it’s interconnected, how long it takes, and what that means for their customers. And, whenever stakeholders have questions or need specific information or what-if scenarios, this can be easily provided.
A Central Source of Truth
Instead of “dealing with the database,” Insureon developers can now focus on business functionality and creativity. “A system based on ES as the primary source of truth really makes sense. The goal of the architecture is to be as simple and clear as possible. ES keeps things simple, functional, and organized,” said Aaron Hanna, Chief Architect. From a developer perspective, it’s easy to read, write, and perceive data in the database the same way it’s perceived in the code. Onboarding is easy and new developers can learn ES in one day.
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