For some insurance companies, moving to a SaaS platform can be a difficult decision, for fear of potential technical or implementation challenges along the way. However, choosing the right software partner makes the journey easy and means more cost savings and improved service overall.
To tell one such success story, I spoke with Don Smith, vice president of information technologies at Renaissance Life and Health Insurance, about his experience with EIS CloudCore, our SaaS insurance platform. He oversaw the procurement and rollout of EIS Suite, its transition to a SaaS solution, and is a key stakeholder in our SaaS delivery today. Here’s how he steered his company to SaaS success and why EIS was the right partner for the journey.
Why did Renaissance choose the EIS SaaS solution, and what are its key benefits?
We chose the EIS solution to help us bring all of our products together into one administration system, which was key for us. By working with EIS, we could consolidate both the software and the administration of the cloud in one location.
What were some of your technology goals in outsourcing and moving to the SaaS platform?
We were looking for a turnkey solution. We weren’t looking to bring a lot of staff in to both administer the software and the cloud space. Having one vendor to report a problem to is a lot easier than going to multiple vendors. Working with EIS really helped us from both a budgetary and service perspective.
Was the transition to the EIS SaaS platform faster than you expected?
It was very fast, and the EIS SaaS team was very responsive. We made the decision to transition to the SaaS platform in the middle of November, and there are two U.S. holidays between then and year end that can be major disruptors in the business world, but we still made our deadlines. Having everything done by year end also helped us from a budgetary and support standpoint.
How does EIS and our SaaS platform help you expand your products and functionality?
EIS is doing things behind the curtain to deliver the software to meet the deadline, so that’s something that we don’t have to worry about.
Tell me about how your IT organization overcame hesitancy in giving up control of your SaaS solution, and why you’re confident that EIS can deliver.
It’s always a leap of faith, and during the last two years, retaining talent to keep our systems running has been a challenge. You need visibility into what’s going on, which the EIS SaaS team gives us on a weekly basis, if not more. There’s a lot of back and forth between Renaissance and EIS with respect to implementation and support. It’s less vendor management, which is always key in the industry.
How does the continual upgrade process work, and how has EIS’ CI/CD pipeline reduced the resource burden on your team?
We only have one person managing and coordinating with the release team at EIS. We don’t have a whole regression team and a whole QA team. That’s all on EIS at this point. We manage and coordinate the releases with EIS, and EIS is always flexible if we need more time, which is particularly important during year end and open enrollment periods.
Do you get the opportunity to pause releases to make sure there are no future bugs deployed into production?
Absolutely, and not only that, but EIS will adjust releases for us accordingly. If we need something expedited, they’ll also include something in a release going forward and will adjust. If something has to be fast tracked, we’ll make the appropriate adjustments for matching.
Are EIS’ service level agreements comparable to other enterprise vendors in the industry?
Yes. The SLAs for the SaaS agreements are very good. We haven’t really experienced any downtime with our SaaS and learning the software. SLAs are tracked, managed, and fully transparent, and we frequently meet with the help desk team and the SaaS team to go through them.
How did you sell the move to SaaS to key stakeholders?
Our executive team is aware of everything that goes on because we have frequent management meetings with the EIS steering committees and executive steering committees. EIS is very transparent about everything going on in both the product and SaaS environment. Working with EIS wasn’t really hard to sell to our executive team because of the cost savings. For us, moving to SaaS has been both a budgetary win and a service win.
Want to learn more about EIS’ SaaS solutions? Talk to us.
