SulAmérica: Significantly reducing IT costs and furthering innovation

About SulAmérica

In Brazil since 1895, SulAmérica is the largest independent multiline insurer in the country and has been listed since 2007 on BM&F Bovespa under the ticker SULA11. SulAmérica is the third largest healthcare operator in Brazil and the largest listed healthcare player, with a full portfolio of health and dental plans. It is also the fourth largest automobile insurer in the country. In 2013, the company had consolidated revenues of R$14.7 billion, including R$12.2 billion in insurance premiums. With over 7 million customers, SulAmérica also operates in private pension, asset management, and savings bonds.

Industries: Financial Services & Insurance
Location: Brazil
Products: Cloud SQL, App Engine

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About CI&T

CI&T builds smart applications that add a layer of intelligence to business. By using web, mobile, social, cloud, and predictive models, the company's teams are relentless in their approach to creating competitive advantages that drive business forward. A global company established in 1995, CI&T is headquartered in Campinas, Brazil (a prominent tech center considered the Brazilian Silicon Valley) with strategic locations across Latin America, North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.

Google Cloud Platform results

  • Experiences 80% cost savings that now fund further innovation on customer side
  • Takes a new approach to modernizing applications by moving the frontend user interface and mainframe to Google Cloud Platform

    Challenge

    The largest independent insurance company in Brazil, SulAmérica, is always on the lookout for opportunities to improve the relationship with their customers. This desire has garnered them a reputation of being early adopters and innovators when it comes to technologies, especially those with which the customer interacts.

    In contrast, this vision was slow to be implemented across the company’s internal technologies, and in 2011 SulAmérica was still running on legacy mainframe and Unix systems designed 15 years earlier. These out-dated systems were difficult to update, prone to disruptions and outages, and took months to implement significant changes. The company knew it was giving up an edge to those competitors with nimbler systems and more customer-friendly interfaces and decided to make a change.

    Solution

    At a time when there was still a lot of resistance to the cloud, and IT teams generally viewed applications in silos, SulAmérica made a bold move and sought a cloud-based solution to replace its legacy systems. It needed an innovative partner with a similar, progressive vision for new technologies but with a solid reputation for high-quality service offerings.

    Long-time partner CI&T was selected for the initiative. Not only did CI&T have the unique perspective and technical vision to match SulAmérica, the company is also a leader in transformational methodologies, including Agile, Scrum, and Lean. Upon understanding SulAmérica’s challenges, CI&T made a recommendation to modernize the applications by strategically adopting cloud within the core business, running critical systems in a PaaS platform. This was unusual, as most companies—especially those with a large, engaged customer base—were only using cloud as a peripheral solution, not as a way to replace the entire frontend user interface.

    CI&T recommended Google Cloud Platform to update the systems because it offers a safe and robust infrastructure with high scalability and reliability. Google’s hosting and middleware costs were also the most competitive as there was no up-front investment.

    Scalability was essential because it allowed SulAmérica to intermittently increase the scope of the environment without incurring additional costs. Further, the constant evolution of Google was great as there were always new, complimentary services available. "When you use Google, you have access to all of its resources: Google search, Google Maps, Fusion tables, Datastore. This is very powerful,” says Cristiano Barbieri, CIO at SulAmérica. This access proved essential in providing SulAmérica’s insurance brokers and end users with better access to the information they need.

    To kick off the project, the existing system was migrated to Google Cloud Platform and the new architecture was carefully designed to integrate with the legacy systems and automate processes from end-to-end. System updates and new components were crafted using an Enterprise Agile development methodology to ensure a short time to market and more transparent and agile business processes. This combination of Agile and Google Cloud Platform has proven to be a very effective recipe.

    SulAmérica services and data flow

    Results

    SulAmérica's move to the cloud changed the day-to-day of the business and spurred a number of innovative developments. SulAmérica is differentiating itself from competitors by reducing costs and human resources that can now be used to further promote innovation in projects with tangible and measurable results.

    With the new platform, which is scalable to grow as the business grows, SulAmérica decreased service disruptions and accelerated business cycles, resulting in improved effectiveness across the company. "Personally I do not remember these applications ever being down. I don't know what kind of magic Google is doing. Even when there are changes or maintenance work in their system, our system does not stop,” says Barbieri. Also, by adopting Google Cloud Platform, SulAmérica significantly reduced costs (about 80%) that would otherwise have gone to software and hardware upgrades. “It’s almost hard to believe it can be so cheap. We weren’t used to that,” continues Barbieri.

    Updates to the system are released quickly, even allowing for experiments in production. Changes that previously took 6 to 9 months are now implemented within days or weeks. "Google Cloud Platform gives us the ability to experiment without spending a ton of money. I can also fund innovation and experiments. We can quickly dismiss what fails and quickly adopt the improvements,” says Barbieri.

    SulAmérica's IT team does not have to spend time and resources maintaining the new infrastructure in the cloud anymore. They can focus on identifying opportunities for the company to further differentiate itself in this highly competitive market.

    These projects are aligned with the mission, vision, and values ​​of SulAmérica: proximity, transparency, excellence, and dynamism.

    “We wanted agility, mobility and transparency in our processes . Besides that, we needed to be clear in our rules for the prices in our products and proposals. The cloud made all that possible.”

    Umberto Reis, Systems Superintendent, SulAmérica Insurance

    Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.

    Contact us

    About SulAmérica

    In Brazil since 1895, SulAmérica is the largest independent multiline insurer in the country and has been listed since 2007 on BM&F Bovespa under the ticker SULA11. SulAmérica is the third largest healthcare operator in Brazil and the largest listed healthcare player, with a full portfolio of health and dental plans. It is also the fourth largest automobile insurer in the country. In 2013, the company had consolidated revenues of R$14.7 billion, including R$12.2 billion in insurance premiums. With over 7 million customers, SulAmérica also operates in private pension, asset management, and savings bonds.

    Industries: Financial Services & Insurance
    Location: Brazil

    About CI&T

    CI&T builds smart applications that add a layer of intelligence to business. By using web, mobile, social, cloud, and predictive models, the company's teams are relentless in their approach to creating competitive advantages that drive business forward. A global company established in 1995, CI&T is headquartered in Campinas, Brazil (a prominent tech center considered the Brazilian Silicon Valley) with strategic locations across Latin America, North America, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region.