Vertafore and Amazon Web Services

How our partnership with AWS is helping our customers win in the race for modernization.

James Thom talks about Vertafore's AWS partnership

Four years ago, Vertafore announced our partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). We had multiple goals for the partnership, including migrating our business-critical products and workloads to the world’s leading cloud, as well as leveraging AWS's expertise to improve workflows and provide insights that our customers can use to better serve their clients.

Today, many Vertafore customers are experiencing some of the outcomes and benefits of our work with AWS in their day-to-day business. And as we continue to leverage this partnership to innovate, more of our customers can expect to see the value it is delivering for them. Here’s just a few things on the horizon.

Vertafore products on the AWS cloud

Of all the work we’re doing with AWS, perhaps the most readily visible element is our on-going initiative to host many of Vertafore’s online products on the AWS cloud.

I’ve had customers ask why we’re moving products to AWS, and it’s fundamentally about better serving our customers and users. First, Vertafore’s core competency is delivering great software solutions to the insurance industry. We don't need to be a data center company—that’s where AWS shines. So by moving our products to AWS, we free up resources to focus on our mission and move the industry forward.

Second, our products are tapping into all of the benefits that come from being hosted on the top leader in cloud technology, including reliable product performance and availability, great uptime, and strong security. We understand how important those factors are to our customers’ success. As much as we’re delivering on those factors today, hosting our products with AWS will just make them that much better.

A number of our products have already made the transition to the cloud, including QQCatalyst, InsurLink, and Proposal Builder, as well as Credential Manager and Vertafore Single Sign-On (VSSO). And this year we’re working on WorkSmart online, BenefitPoint, Sagitta online, and ReferenceConnect. Our goal is to transition our products in a very measured way, with minimal impact for our customers. That approach is working—we’ve moved products with no service interruptions and or degradation of service.

Product innovation, data insights, and more

But our relationship with AWS goes well beyond hosting and cloud services. It extends into the architecture of our products. In AWS we have an amazing partner with a massive technical understanding of how we can be thinking about re-architecting our InsurTech solutions for better performance and usability.

They're also helping us with our core technology. We started journeys with AWS back in the day around using natural language processing in our products. And we’re taking advantage of many of the services that AWS provides to extend the capabilities of the core products and systems and innovate within our core products, as well.

One of the most exciting things we're working on with AWS revolves around data and reporting. For example, we've been working with Amazon QuickSight—AWS’s business intelligence platform—to extend the reporting capabilities inside several of our products. That includes looking at how we provide even more flexible custom reporting, as well as how we can modernize older reporting tools that we have embedded in our solutions.

It's also about how we can enable our customers with the data that's in their Vertafore systems and deliver that data in real time in a consumable way. The goal is giving customers access to use the data to build what they want and partner with other technology providers, like our Vertafore Orange Partners, to leverage that data to run their businesses better. I’m incredibly excited about how these initiatives will give our customers more data insights to drive efficiency and growth.

In May during Accelerate, Liz Nguyen, Vertafore’s Chief Technology Officer, and I sat down with Ralph Severini from AWS to talk about our partnership. Watch the recording of our conversation to learn more about how this partnership is enabling us to support the success of our customers.

Video URL

Highlights:

  • 03:00 – Update on moving our products to the cloud
  • 06:20 – Six Cs of partnership
  • 11:00 – Data insights, IoT, and insurance
  • 17:30 – Our data strategy and AWS
  • 28:10 – What’s next in security
  • 32:10 – Generative AI and the insurance industry
  • 39:00 – Looking ahead
James Thom

James Thom
Chief Product Officer

James joined Vertafore in 2017 to lead Corporate Development and Strategy, shepherding the company through major acquisitions and a transition in ownership to Roper Technologies. After 3+ years of steering our growth in that role, he now oversees the Product Management organization as Chief Product Officer. With extensive experience in strategy, technology, and insurance, James and his team are driving Vertafore’s leadership position in Insurance Technology.