EMPLOYERS Modernizes Digital Transformation with Red Hat

The century-old workers’ compensation insurance provider incorporates agile methodologies and automation in its commitment to uncover new innovation opportunities in an ever-changing marketplace

RALEIGH, CAROLINE DU NORD -

Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that EMPLOYERS, a national provider of workers’ compensation insurance, has built a hybrid cloud foundation for its IT infrastructure using Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies. The Red Hat-based solution enabled EMPLOYERS to use technology to improve agility, innovation, scalability and flexibility, with the end goal of exceeding agent and policyholder expectations. Using the new, open cloud infrastructure, EMPLOYERS has successfully written and implemented more than 19,000 business pricing rules, automated portions of its underwriting and pricing processes, driven greater profitability and enhanced the overall efficiency of the business.

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Red Hat helped us modernize our technologies, which is not easy in a highly regulated industry, and in doing so, helped us offer our customers more innovative and competitive solutions.”

Jeff Shaw

executive vice president and chief information officer, EMPLOYERS

Helping EMPLOYERS Continue to Evolve Through Innovative, Customer-Focused Solutions

EMPLOYERS has been providing small businesses workers’ compensation insurance coverage for more than a century, expanding from serving only small businesses in Nevada when it was founded in 1913, to operating in 46 states and the District of Columbia. As the company expanded, it needed to overhaul its technology systems in order to compete with emerging fintech startups and support customers in new markets. EMPLOYERS worked with Red Hat Consulting to establish systems of record based on the legacy technology and surrounding them with modern, more flexible and easier to update applications, delivered on Red Hat OpenShift.

Working with Red Hat Consulting, EMPLOYERS developers created new applications on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading enterprise Kubernetes platform, running on Amazon Web Services (AWS). With its open hybrid cloud infrastructure based on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, EMPLOYERS’ cloud-native applications are now deployed on the same consistent foundation as its on-premises infrastructure.  EMPLOYERS also uses Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform as its common platform to automate both its AWS environments and on-premises datacenter, enabling its operations team to automate many historically time-consuming, manual and repeatable business processes, such as policy price change submissions and focus instead on adding value.

Delivering results and shifting culture the open source way

By deploying Red Hat’s open hybrid cloud technologies, EMPLOYERS now has a platform to better serve existing customers and further grow its business. Today, the average time to deliver new customer quotes has dropped from 20 minutes to two minutes, all while growing the policyholder base by 14%, as the company expands into new industries and markets.

EMPLOYERS also saw value in the open source approach beyond technology upgrades. Through this digital transformation initiative, the insurer has seen an overall cultural shift, with the technical and business processes improving to become more agile, modern, flexible and scalable. This has led to a better experience for customers, brokers and other policy stakeholders and helped form a culture of innovation within EMPLOYERS.

Supporting Quotes
Jason Smith, vice president, North America Services, Red Hat
“EMPLOYERS has a long, successful history in providing small to medium sized businesses workers’ compensation insurance. They already had the innovation mindset, and our team worked closely with EMPLOYERS developers to modernize their existing technology ideas. We were impressed with how quickly EMPLOYERS embraced both open source technology and culture shifts to be able to provide more flexible options for customers and stakeholders. We look forward to continuing this great relationship and are excited to see what the future holds for EMPLOYERS.”

Jeff Shaw, executive vice president and chief information officer, EMPLOYERS
“In order to keep up with ever-changing customer and market demands, we knew that modern, scalable and open technologies must be at the heart of how EMPLOYERS operates. By working closely with Red Hat consultants to refine our technology strategy, we have not only set ourselves up for the next hundred years of success, but are seeing immediate, tangible results. Red Hat helped us modernize our technologies, which is not easy in a highly regulated industry, and in doing so, helped us offer our customers more innovative and competitive solutions.”

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