Allstate employs cloud insurance technology to grow new businesses

cloud insurance technology

The insurer may be in its 80s, but it is keeping up with the latest tech and changes in the industry.

Allstate first opened in 1931, but the cloud insurance technology it’s now using shows that it has no interest in aging. The insurer is branching into new areas to be able to build and grow new business as its environment changes around it.

Over the last few years, Allstate Insurance launched its CompoZed unit to boost software services development.

This use of cloud insurance technology gives Allstate the ability to compete with more traditional and established insurers as well as edgy new startups. The goal is also to be able to move in the insurance industry in the same way that Airbnb has shifted the lodging market and Uber has changed the way we think of transportation.

CompoZed Labs first launched in 2014. Since then, it has grown to the point that it now manages 40 percent of all Allstate software development. This, according to the insurer’s vice president of technology innovation, Doug Safford.

Allstate uses the cloud insurance technology in a spectrum of different ways via several platforms and software.

cloud insurance technologyCompoZed Labs uses software workbench platform Pivotal Cloud Foundry to build apps operating on internal servers or on public cloud infrastructures from third parties such as Google, Microsoft or Amazon. It is a Dell Technologies Unit offering Cloud Foundry in a free, open source commercial software version.

That said, developers at Allstate also use Git for tracking the software changes continually made through Jenkins. They also use Atlassian Jira for project management. Safford explained that this toolset provides the development teams at the insurance company with everything they need for rapid idea testing. They can determine if they work and then implement the software so it will be available to users.

This cloud insurance technology based process is in near opposition to the traditional way of thinking and implementing new business software. Conventionally, building and deploying a new product can take months or years, depending on its complexity.

Allstate vice president and divisional chief information officer, Opal Perry, said “When you’re an 86-year-old company things have done a certain way, there are rules in place because of what someone did 10 years ago,” adding that “Now, instead of a 200-person team, you have small six- and eight-person teams working on things. It unleashes creativity.”

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