Australia’s big insurers are undertaking well publicised digital journeys to improve data use and the efficiency of interactions with brokers and direct customers. These digital upgrades are slowly uncoupling insurers from the legacy computer systems that frustrate thousands of brokers every day.
However, are insurers substituting their dependence on legacy IT for an even more dependent embrace? This close relationship involves cloud technology firms owned by Larry Page (Google Cloud), Jeff Bezos (AWS or Amazon Web Services) and the successors of Bill Gates (Microsoft Azure).
According to Synergy Research Group, Google, AWS and Microsoft together provide more than 50% of the world’s cloud computing. Many of Australia’s companies, including insurers, are using these cloud services.
“One thing that I think is quite powerful about this is it [container software] allows us to decouple ourselves from the likes of AWS or Microsoft,” said Charles Pizzato (pictured above) Suncorp’s executive general manager of IT infrastructure.
Pizzato was explaining to Insurance Business his firm’s use of open-source, so called container, software. This type of software has been around since the 1970s, but Suncorp is using the latest versions of it as part of its digital journey. Pizzato said containers are executable units of software in which application code is packaged so it is portable and platform independent.
“In layman’s terms, a container is a portable piece of code that, for instance, allows you to run a certain technology without you having to think about the virtual machine, or the storage, or the network,” said Pizzato. “It takes all of that complexity away and you just deploy the container on top of OpenShift.”
According to IBM’s online blog, OpenShift, made by American software company Red Hat, is one of the most widely used container software options, the other is called Kubernetes.
Pizzato said Suncorp uses many open-source technologies.
“But we have to be careful about how we use it because we still need the supportability of an enterprise that enterprises need when they’re deploying production workloads to these things so that if there are issues, they’re going to be fixed,” he said.
Red Hat, he said, provided that enterprise management.
“So they built around what is an open source technology to give something that enterprises like Suncorp can take advantage of,” said Pizzato.
He said one of the services his insurance firm has built on top of it is a new pricing engine.
“Our next generation pricing engine which helps us more accurately price risk sits on top of OpenShift," said Pizzato.
This managed container platform takes advantage of the cloud without being as dependent on it.
“It allows our developers to very rapidly build software but using microservices type architecture environments to be able to effectively write and deploy software completely as code,” said Pizzato. “It takes away any sort of manual processes or reliance on physical server provisioning: you’re building software as code from the get-go.”
He said one of the advantages of container software is it allows Suncorp’s IT developers to standardise how they build code for their insurance platforms.
“It’s very secure and it means that we shift a lot of the sort of traditional infrastructure management away from our teams,” he said. “It also gives us a lot of flexibility and portability.”
Pizzato said by changing a single line of code his firm could deploy a platform to its cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure or AWS from within Suncorp’s data centres. He said this changes how the insurer thinks about its future IT options.
“Do we want to be working with AWS in three years, or Microsoft? Or is Google more hungry for our business?” he said. “Then how do we think about that shift? It’s just a very different proposition, it becomes a much simpler exercise.”
Pizzato agreed that this open-source container software has helped make their digital journey more independent.
“Much more independent,” he said. “It gives us abstraction from those hyperscalers, effectively, in operating on that platform.”
He referred to his firm’s new headquarters in Brisbane. “The placeOS platform is used to digitally control 28 different technology elements of the digital building and the placeOS platform sits on top of OpenShift," said Pizzato.
Pizzato said container software led improvements to the back-end of his firm’s operations are being felt indirectly by brokers and customers.
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“The [open-source container] technology gives us the ability to do things that would take us longer to do or we wouldn’t be able to do as effectively on other platforms,” he said.
Pizzato said Suncorp already deploys open-source technology platforms that are used by brokers to get speedier answers around risk.
“Technologies like OpenShift allow us to build those sorts of solutions effectively and will ultimately make it easier for our customers whether they engage with us directly or our brokers through platforms like VeroEdge,” he said.
