Agency Systems empowers insurance agencies to streamline everyday tasks with SoftwareOne and Amazon WorkSpaces

Previous deployment falls short of internal and client needs

Agency Systems, an independent software vendor (ISV) specialising in insurance management applications, was looking to modernise its application delivery through managed virtual desktops. The initial deployment of a shared Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) model was falling short on data security, application performance, and availability. Moreover, the solution could not easily scale to accommodate a growing customer base. “We were unhappy with the security and performance of other hosting solutions commonly in use, even today, in support of the insurance agency marketplace,” explained Bud Allen, Executive Director of Agency Systems.

The optimal solution would need to:

• Address security concerns
• Improve application performance, availability, and reliability
• Eliminate the time-consuming, manual process of onboarding each customer, factoring the limited technical staff available
• Provide a consistent and efficient digital workplace solution, manageable at scale across hundreds of clients

Agency Systems turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Tier Services partner SoftwareOne, recognising its comprehensive digital workplace consulting services, extensive end-user computing (EUC) experience, and core competency of automating cloud infrastructure deployments.

From our first meeting with SoftwareOne, they put us at ease with how they would investigate what we had and how we would move forward. It wasn’t a bunch of unknowns—they had answers to put the right solution in place.

– Andy Ostermann, IT Director, Agency Systems

Comprehensive end-user computing services and automation improve user experience and scalability

SoftwareOne conducted an AWS Well-Architected review of Agency Systems’ current solution to identify the necessary remediation and shape the proposed scope of work:

• Enabling scaling of hundreds of customers and thousands of users with an improved architecture and automated deployment solution
• Piloting the solution with Agency Systems’ customers to validate the user experience and define effective migration plans
• Mobilising production operations and support for the solution with SoftwareOne’s managed services

SoftwareOne brought an experience level that was light years ahead. They demonstrated a knowledge base that exceeded everything we had encountered, even after working with the previous vendor for over a year. SoftwareOne’s recommendations made sense from day one.

– R.H. Bud Allen, Executive Director, Agency Systems

Moving from a pooled multi-tenant virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) solution to a dedicated, persistent VDI solution with over 500 Amazon WorkSpaces provides a cloud-hosted desktop for each Agency Systems customer who uses the insurance management software. Replatforming its desktop applications to a fully managed Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) solution on AWS has provided Agency Systems with improved application availability, performance and security.

SoftwareOne automated the process of building each new customer environment, replacing a time-consuming, manual, and inconsistent implementation process. Non-technical personnel can now provision a new customer environment, confident that each one is set up correctly.

With Amazon WorkSpaces, VDI software, and infrastructure, components are integrated into a single solution making it easy to provision and deploy new workspaces as needed. Before SoftwareOne, it took days to onboard new users. Now we can do it in minutes.

– Andy Ostermann, IT Director, Agency Systems

Automated application deployment reduces onboarding from days to minutes and secures capacity for growth

End-user computing on Amazon WorkSpaces offers Agency Systems a fast and efficient way to deliver desktops in the cloud. SoftwareOne took it one step further by automating the entire provisioning process for new customers, augmenting Agency Systems’ capacity to scale, accelerating their time to value, and amplifying their expertise.

• Providing each customer user with their own virtual desktop vs. competing for shared computing resources translates into higher availability, performance, and customer satisfaction.
• Dedicated cloud-hosted desktops for each user provide a secure workspace, accessible only to the user, with corporate data secure at rest in the AWS cloud and all data in transit automatically encrypted.
• Non-technical personnel can efficiently and consistently provision new customer environments with the confidence that those environments are set up correctly, freeing limited technical personnel for other initiatives.
• The time to onboard a customer is now measured in minutes, not hours or days.
• With the new web-based solution, the capacity to onboard rose from 50 systems a year to more than 500.
• Automation minimises overhead and management time for monthly updates across hundreds of customer environments, allowing for growth without expanding the back office.