New Zealand Insurer FMG Customer of Actifio

Actifio, Inc. has made an impact on the application development process at FMG Insurance Limited, New Zealand’s rural insurer – as it has done for hundreds of organizations around the world in recent months.

Tim Wales, application development and support manager, FMG, said: “Sometimes you see something that, at first, seems too good to be true. That was my initial impression with Actifio. I didn’t believe it would perform as advertised. And then it did. Actifio has changed the way we do business. FMG has seen massive growth over the last few years. If we were still operating under the old model, that growth wouldn’t be possible.“

To scale its evolving IT infrastructure for expanding insurance platforms and rapid company growth, FMG implemented the Actifio platform with Jenkins, an open-source automation system, to create a self-service portal for developers and testers to refresh a database copy more than 1TB in size whenever needed in 10 minutes or less. Besides accelerating application development by reducing refresh times from two hours to 10 minutes, Actifio has enabled a huge reduction in storage requirements, providing nearly 50TB of database clones with 2TB of actual disk space used.

FMG is a rural insurer in New Zealand. Started by farmers in 1905, it provides advice and insurance to farmers and growers across 30 offices nationwide. To support its rapid growth, it invested in Guidewire Software, Inc., an enterprise insurance software and service platform suite. Upon its implementation, FMG could not keep up with the demand of production sized development and test environments using the traditional backup and restore method due to time and storage constraints. After consulting their IT support provider, FMG connected with Actifio.

After initial testing of Actifio Sky, FMG’s development team moved into its new technology landscape. FMG was able to run old and new software versions simultaneously during a recent Guidewire platform upgrade, providing each developer and tester with multiple sets of production database copies. Actifio’s API support has enabled FMG to automate its database provisioning process and integrate it into their continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, also providing developers and testers with self-service capability to refresh a database via a web portal whenever needed, cutting what was previously a two hour-long process down to ten minutes.

Ash Ashutosh, co-founder and CEO, Actifio, said: “Our work with FMG demonstrates how the Actifio software platform eases the process of digital transformation – especially in a crucial growth period for the organization. Actifio is proud to play a role in FMG’s current and future growth, and we look forward to helping them and their clients innovate into the future.“

Case study