Auto-Owners Insurance Slashes Time to Resolve Application Issues from Days to Hours with AppDynamics

Press Release

  • AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform supports Auto-Owners’ digital transformation initiatives
  • Performance issues proactively resolved before impacting agents

SAN FRANCISCO – MARCH 29, 2016 – AppDynamics, a leading application intelligence company helping power enterprise digital transformation, today announced that Auto-Owners Insurance, a century-old, Fortune 500 mutual insurance company, has chosen the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform to optimize performance in support of the company’s digital transformation efforts.

Auto-Owners Insurance uses the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform to monitor and optimize performance across its Java-based applications, which provide business-critical customer inquiries, quoting, claims submissions, and marketing services for 39,000 agents in approximately 6,200 agencies.

Auto-Owners releases updates to its applications once a week. While its goal is zero software defects, sometimes errors do occur and can be difficult to pinpoint. According to Tony Dean, vice president of information systems and technology at Auto-Owners, “Our code is very interwoven between multiple teams, and often several releases occur in a given night. This significantly increases the complexity of resolving issues. Prior to the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform, we simply did not have the tools to quickly identify certain system problems. As you might expect, this sometimes resulted in time-consuming research.”

Shortly after deploying the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform, Dean saw a noticeable difference. “AppDynamics helped us accelerate problem resolution. Today, we can identify problems much more quickly than in the past.  Issues that once required multiple days to troubleshoot are now resolved in hours.”

According to Todd Miller, manager of the web infrastructure administration team, the Auto-Owners’ application performance management selection process started with a test drive. “After researching options, one of our IT associates downloaded AppDynamics APM for a free 30-day trial. We immediately realized the benefits of the software, as it highlighted inefficiencies within our code and helped us pinpoint performance issues,” Miller said.

News of the AppDynamics Application Intelligence Platform quickly spread across the IT division of the company as developers and IT staff began using the tool and informing their peers about it. In addition to accelerating problem resolution, development groups within Auto-Owners began finding issues in their code that they didn’t even know they had, allowing them to make refinements to contribute toward better overall application performance.

In today’s hyper-connected environment, customers and business partners expect responsive access to business services via a growing number of mobile platforms. To support these needs, Auto-Owners recently redesigned its customer portal, allowing mobile subscribers to view policies, pay bills, and download and print documents. “Today, our members and agents want responsive access using multiple browsers and mobile devices, such as tablets and smartphones,” Dean said. “With AppDynamics Browser Real-User Monitoring, we get application performance measurements all the way down to the end users’ browsers. This is very helpful in designing applications and refining system performance.” 

AppDynamics President and CEO David Wadhwani said, “Today, responsive and predictable application performance is a business imperative for competitive advantage and customer satisfaction. We are thrilled to be working with Auto-Owners Insurance as they execute their digital transformation strategy to deliver a superior agent experience and cement their leadership position in the insurance industry."

For regular news and information about AppDynamics and the APM market, like and follow the company on:

Twitter:  @AppDynamics

Facebook:  http://on.fb.me/1fuD8NO

LinkedIn:  www.linkedin.com/company/appdynamics

A free trial of AppDynamics is available here.


About Auto-Owners Insurance
Founded in 1916 in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, Auto-Owners Insurance is a Fortune 500 company and the 18th largest property/casualty insurance company in the nation, based on written premium. Headquartered in Lansing, Michigan, the company serves policyholders in 26 states.


About AppDynamics
AppDynamics is the Application Intelligence company. With AppDynamics, enterprises have real-time insights into application performance, user performance and business performance so they can move faster in an increasingly sophisticated, software-driven world. AppDynamics’ integrated suite of applications is built on its innovative, enterprise-grade App iQ Platform that enables its customers to make faster decisions that enhance customer engagement and improve operational and business performance. AppDynamics is uniquely positioned to enable enterprises to accelerate their digital transformations by actively monitoring, analyzing and optimizing complex application environments at scale.

AppDynamics reserves the right to change any planned features at any time before making them generally available as well as never making them generally available. Any buying decisions should be made based on features that are currently generally available.

AppDynamics is a registered trademark of AppDynamics, Inc. © 2008-2018 AppDynamics, Inc. All rights reserved. All other product and company names herein may be trademarks of their registered owners.