COMPANY: GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company)
CATEGORY: Superior Alternatives
INDUSTRY: Insurance
GEOGRAPHY: US
BUSINESS CHALLENGE: Existing middleware platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.
MIGRATION PATH: Proprietary middleware platform to JBoss Enterprise Middleware
SOFTWARE: JBoss Enterprise Application Platform: 28 bands (1 band = 32 CPUs), Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), Red Hat Consulting, Amentra
HARDWARE: 50 Dell x86 servers
BENEFITS: Reduced the total cost of ownership by more than 30%, throughput gain of 3X with utilization down to 1/3rd of the current platform, overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware
GEICO (Government Employees Insurance Company) is the third-largest private passenger auto insurer in the United States based on the latest 12 months written premium. GEICO provides auto insurance coverage for nearly 9 million policyholders and insures more than 14.4 million vehicles.
In addition to auto insurance, GEICO also offers customers insurance for their motorcycles and homes. Commercial auto insurance, boat, ATV, RV, personal umbrella protection and life insurance are also available.
GEICO is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Berkshire Hathaway group of companies, is rated A++ for financial stability by A.M. Best Company and ranks at the top of several national customer satisfaction surveys. For more information about GEICO, go to www.geico.com.
In 2007, GEICO's enterprise architecture team recognized they were facing several challenges with their existing middleware platform. The platform was complex to manage, not performing and scaling as expected and expensive to maintain. The architecture team decided to investigate alternatives that could be deployed that would better meet their needs.
More detail on the challenges with the existing middleware is documented below.
GEICO conducted extensive research and identified Sun's GlassFish and Red Hat's JBoss as potential solutions that were suitable for GEICO's application and infrastructure. JBoss Enterprise Middleware was selected based on their market share and extensive support from Red Hat. GEICO conducted a proof-of-concept, and installed JBoss Enterprise Middleware, as the current middleware application platform in a cluster of servers (POC environment). Performance and load tests were conducted using various tools for a selected business application on both platforms.
The results from these tests were astonishing. A few highlights are listed below:
GEICO also conducted multiple reference checks with organizations that were of similar size and industry. The reference checks were extremely positive about Red Hat.
The solution consisted of acquiring the licenses for JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JEAP). The initial deployment environment consisted of 17 bands. An additional 11 bands were added at a later date. (1 band = 32 CPUs). A plan was put together to aggressively migrate 2 out of 3 mission critical applications in a time span of 3 months. GEICO also acquired the TAM license (Red Hat Technical Account Manager dedicated to GEICO) as part of the contract.
By implementing the new JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, GEICO was able to reduce the total cost of ownership by more than 30%.
The added benefit was a throughput gain of 3X with utilization down to 1/3rd of the current platform. The overall resource utilization went from above 50% to under 10% which allowed significant room for scalability without having to acquire additional hardware.
One of the challenges for GEICO was the time bound migration process. GEICO's middleware team was trained on JBoss for a week. With the support of Red Hat and Amentra (a Division of Red Hat), they successfully migrated not only the planned 2 out of 3 applications but all 3 applications. This was a clear demonstration of expertise in Red Hat Consulting services and the ability of GEICO's middleware team to adapt rapidly.
"Open-source does not translate to unsupported". Don't be afraid of change. GEICO had initial concerns about support, stability and deploying open-source software for its mission critical applications. The market maturity and the premium level of support offered by Red Hat made it very easy to make the change to an open source solution. If your organization has been slow to consider adopting open-source solutions, the competitive advantage that can be gained based on the lower cost of ownership and utilization of efficient/best of breed products can be lost.
