Seven Corners Achieves Zero Downtime to Support Travelers

Travelers move around the world quicker than before. To
keep up, travel insurance companies need a IT infrastructure with zero
downtime to provide customers with travel support and insurance 24/7/365.

Seven Corners, Inc., an international travel insurance and specialty benefit
company, turned to the FlexPod data center platform, a
pretested data center solution built on a flexible, scalable shared
infrastructure designed collaboratively by Cisco
Systems, Inc. and NetApp, Inc. to meet a world of travelers’ needs.

Seven Corners has over 170 permanent employees located in the Midwest,
and roughly 10,000 agents and 900 brokers worldwide. Until recently, the IT
department was limited in its capabilities by an aging infrastructure that
caused outages and by recovery costs approaching $3,000 daily just to maintain
24/7 operations. The company needed a cost-effective solution, and fast.

CIO George L. Reed II turned to Netech, a provider of IP-based
integration services, for a solution that would make IT a strategic part of
Seven Corners’ growth plan. Netech suggested a FlexPod solution that
combines NetApp, Cisco, and VMware solutions to deliver
engineering value with scalability and configuration flexibility to enable all
phases of Seven Corners’ strategic plan.

Faster with FlexPod

• Zero downtime delivers
  8-month ROI: By reducing an average of
  12 daily outages across Seven Corners’ core physical servers to 0, the company
  realized roughly $750,000 annual savings in the first eight months of
  deployment.
• More effective claims: Employees in
  the Claims Department can work remotely, resulting in no lost time during
  severe weather. In addition, the faster systems cut the time it takes to
  process a claim from 15-20 minutes to roughly 15-20 seconds.
• Capacity savings: Seven Corners was
  able to reduce usage to 60% less storage, the equivalent of a year’s worth of
  new capacity for the organization. The extra space allowed the company to
  expedite the next two phases of the project, including deploying a virtual
  desktop environment approximately two years earlier than planned.
• Staff and IT resource savings: In
  the first three months of deploying the new solution, the percentage of IT
  dollars spent on break-fix dropped from 80% to 16% and the staff required to
  support the IT infrastructure was reduced by 40%. The saved resources enable
  staff to do more with less across the company.

Peter Howard, senior director, Data Center Alliances, NetApp, said: "Providing high-quality travel insurance and
benefits services is Seven Corners’ mission, and key to making this happen is
their ability to meet growing traveler requirements for the latest in
technology tools. With an IT foundation built on FlexPod, they are now able to
achieve greater IT and cost efficiencies that allow them to scale quickly and
easily so they can focus on IT being an integral part of helping to grow the
business."

George L. Reed II, CIO, Seven Corners, said: "In our business, where customers are
clamoring for new services, time to market determines which company gets the
business – typically the first to deliver wins 60% of the revenue. The agility
and flexibility we’ve gained from FlexPod helps us deliver products faster,
quickly identify and reduce losses on unproductive programs, and rapidly
capitalize on successes."