Entertainment Insurance Gets Set in the Cloud

Specialization Creates Challenges

Entertainment producers need rapid responses from their vendors to build and adjust budgets for productions. However, turning around a one-day entertainment insurance quote is extremely challenging.

Why? Entertainment insurance is highly specialized. Think about automating the generation of a policy for a movie with stunts involving a car chase that ends in a big-rig crash. Or imagine trying to take into account the health of each actor in doing the risk assessment that he might be sidelined during the shoot. What about creating the policy for MGM should people in the audience file for injury claims of stress after witnessing a Siegfried & Roy tiger attack? How do you crank out that policy quote in hours instead of days at the press of a button?

Cracking the Nut of Automated Insurance

You might think some large insurance company was able to crack this difficult nut of automating the entertainment insurance industry. Nope. The husband and wife team of Andee and Brad cracked it. True love and the bursting of the Internet bubble originally brought them together. At the time, Brad’s career was squarely in IT, while Andee was (you guessed it) working in the entertainment insurance business. They started dating when things began to slow down in the technology world, and Andee was struggling with how to manage her IT needs. Connecting the dots, she persuaded Brad to help her automate her new business.

Over the next 18 months, they plugged away at building their automation system. The completed system worked phenomenally -- so well, in fact, that they grew premium volume from $8 million to $117 million and delivered an eight-fold improvement in premium processed per employee -- all in only four years. Today, Andee and Brad operate both the Truman Van Dyke Company (tvdco.com), which offers entertainment insurance at retail, and New Empire Entertainment Insurance Services (neeis.com), which provides insurance wholesale to brokers.
Andee is also a shrewd businesswoman -- just ask Brad. She knew that technology was key to their success, and she knew how to keep a very good IT guy -- marry him.

Casting Call

The question was never whether to go to the cloud, but rather which cloud to choose? Brad, responsible for IT, was demanding and wanted to make very few compromises with minimal issues. In a nutshell, he wanted a secure, scalable environment that “just worked.” Acting as the casting director after a very long casting call, Brad selected Joyent.

Protecting The Key To The Magic Castle

New Empire Entertainment Services makes its back-office automation application available to 300+ brokers through its website. That back-office application is, as Brad describes it, “the keys to the magic castle.” It’s a key differentiator that allows New Empire Entertainment Services, Inc. to beat the competition. Therefore, Brad’s number one concern is security; no hacker-made bootleg copies coming through unsecured ports for Brad.

From the cloud provider, one crucial part of the stack he has no control over is the operating system; therefore, he wanted to run the cloud portion of this business on the most secure operating system out there. From Brad’s perspective that operating system is Solaris, given it was built from the ground up to meet the stringent federal and telecom security requirements. That was one major reason Joyent got the gig, because its SmartOS operating environment is built on Solaris.

Potential To Scale

Putting aside all the apparently glamorous details of entertainment insurance, at the end of the day customer service is paramount for Brad and Andee’s businesses. The entertainment insurance market has softened in the last few years. This means the price of insurance premiums has come down. Unfortunately the amount of work to process a policy has remained the same. New Empire Entertainment Services, Inc. has responded to this challenge by focusing on efficiency and utilizing the web as its biggest competitive weapon.

The automation Brad and Andee have accomplished is not limited to only entertainment insurance. There are many other specialized insurance verticals that could take advantage of what they’ve built. However, to really be able to deploy to larger insurance verticals, they needed the ability to scale to an even larger number of brokers.

This is where the cloud also has an upper hand. “With Joyent I know how to make my application scale, and it’s just as simple as bumping up one to two to three SmartMachines,” says Brad. Bada bing bada boom.

The Supporting Cast

As a small business, your vendors are critical to your success; just as in making a movie, your supporting cast is critical to your production. According to Brad, Joyent support puts the customer first, leaving the “that’s not our policy” mindset behind.
Brad describes an interaction with Joyent support when he needed a bigger SmartMachine to assist in his development. He called support and sheepishly asked the support person if he could bump him up to a larger SmartMachine for a couple of hours so he could complete his work. In less than an hour, the support person responded and asked Brad: “How about we bump you up for a week? Would a week be enough?” Having a supporting cast that’s on the same page as the director goes a long way!

That’s A Take!

Any small business operating on the web has a number of challenges, especially if that business has dreams of even bigger growth and success. To meet the infrastructure delivery requirements, you need an IT partner with a secure and robust platform that can scale with your success. If you follow The Truman Van Dyke Company and New Empire Entertainment Services, Inc. recipe for success, you might want to give Joyent a call.