I starting playing with computers as a teenager in the late 70’s and by 1981 was programming dBase II on CPM based systems for 10$/hr. In 1982 I was introduced to Unix via the Fortune Systems 32:16 running BSD 4.1. I stayed with Unix as a developer until 1991, which included a 7 month prototype/evaluation of SmallTalk-80 and the MVC design pattern on a Sun workstation, and then working with IBM AIX on mainframes at Locus Computing Corp. I worked as a sales engineer for Sun Microsystems 1991 thru 1995. I worked for BEA systems specializing in TUXEDO and mainframe integration in the late 1990’s thru 2000.
In 2001 my new wife and I became part owners, and I became CIO, of a small Insurance wholesaler specializing in the entertainment industry. This introduced me to the world of Microsoft Office and BackOffice. We were bought out in October of 2004 by Travelers. From early 2005 I have focused on web development, I settled on Ruby on Rails as my web infrastructure of choice late in 2007.
We purchased an entertainment insurance agency in 2008 and I deployed my first RoR website on a Joyent shared accelerator. In 2010 we launched a new wholesale business, which includes a transactional website integrated to a Microsoft SQL Server based application in our back office, deployed on a Joyent SmartMachine.
| Entertainment Insurance Gets Set in the Cloud |
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| How a husband and wife team built a multmillion-dollar business that leverages Joyent’s cloud to bring new levels of automation to a very challenging insurance industry vertical. |
| by
Larry Aiken |
| With all the numerous details that go into creating a multimillion-dollar blockbuster, calling the insurance agent to get a policy is often a producer’s have-to-have-it-today, last-minute call. Unfortunately, delivering insurance quotes for entertainment has always been a challenge to automate, meaning most players take at least three days to respond. This created an opportunity for entrepreneurs Andee Abad and Brad Hodges from the Truman Van Dyke Company and New Empire Entertainment Services, Inc. to step in and deliver an upgrade to the insurance industry, bringing new levels of automation and delivering same-day entertainment insurance quotes. They didn’t have the time, money or interest to build their own IT infrastructure. Instead, they choose Joyent’s cloud to play a starring role. |
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