Grange Insurance increases user count by 100% and rolls out resource intensive custom applications with AppSense
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- AppSense Performance Manager
- Citrix
Tech Stack
- Citrix
- AppSense Performance Manager
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Cost Savings
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
- Functional Applications - Enterprise Resource Planning Systems (ERP)
Applicable Industries
- Finance & Insurance
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
Use Cases
- Remote Asset Management
- Process Control & Optimization
Services
- System Integration
- Software Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
Grange Insurance is a $1 billion-plus insurance company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Founded in 1935 to provide low-cost auto insurance for rural customers, Grange has grown into a multi-line company offering auto, home, life, business, and farm coverage through a network of independent insurance agents in Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. In 2001, Grange affiliated with Integrity Insurance, based in Appleton, Wisconsin, to expand its geographic footprint into Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.
The Challenge
Since affiliating with Integrity Insurance, Grange has been assessing ways to streamline workflows between the two companies. While continuing to operate as separate entities, the two organizations share a great deal of information throughout the lifecycle of a particular policy or claim. Applications used by both organizations are incredibly memory intensive and working out a way to streamline the systems in a way that facilitated access from both companies was proving costly.\n\nAdam Wilson, Citrix Administrator, Open Systems Area and Emerging Technologies for Grange Insurance, explained. “We run our policy and claim handling applications in a Citrix environment to minimize processing requirements at the desktop,” he said. “We wanted to roll out the applications to our affiliate, Integrity Insurance, but that would require adding three extra Citrix servers to the farm because of the nature of the applications they would be running - quite a heavy load and, therefore, a considerable expense.”\n\nGrange Insurance was already running 15 Citrix servers and wanted to see if there was any way to avoid adding three more.
The Solution
Wilson contacted AppSense, which worked with the team at Grange to conduct a quick analysis of the company’s IT environment. Initial tests showed that Grange would be able to double the number of users on each server simply with the help of AppSense Performance Manager.\n\nInitial testing provided clear results very quickly. “We could either buy new Citrix servers and spend time configuring them all,” said Wilson. “Or we could consolidate the existing ones to accommodate the additional users in a quarter of the time using AppSense Performance Manager. The decision was readily apparent.”\n\nAppSense Performance Manager optimizes application and user environments to ensure maximum hardware utilization with an optimal, consistent quality of service. Using AppSense Performance Manager, Grange Insurance was able to limit the resources available to the critical memory-intensive applications, ensuring consistent capacity for every user on the server.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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