Alatorre Avendaño Y Compañia (AARCO) is a leading insurance and bonding agency in Mexico that works with the country’s preeminent insurance companies. After over 35 years as an industry leader, AARCO was facing immense problems with its server base that needed to be effectively amended for their clients and team as an organization committed to technological innovation. The AARCO IT team searched for an on-premises, cloud-based solution with an integrated infrastructure that would provide a fix to their current issues while also advancing their company beyond competitors. With Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure and additional solutions, AARCO can provide improved services to their clients through improved operational efficiency, maximized uptime, and faster response times.
| Improved operational efficiency | Maximized uptime | Faster response times |
|---|---|---|
| Ease of server management and general usability through more powerful and streamlined infrastructure. | Improved customer service and decline in inefficiencies, thanks to a reduction in downtime. | Reduced response times for technology-related incidents from between 72 hours and one week to only 10 minutes. |
The response time for an incident with our previous infrastructure was between 72 hours and one week depending on the severity of the case. Now with Nutanix, we solve it in 10 minutes—it is amazing. I have no words to explain how easy Nutanix has made it for us, it improved our response time by 1000%.
With a presence in more than 80% of Mexico territory, AARCO is proud to be a national leader in the adoption of innovative technologies to better serve their valued customers.
“In our industry, we are leaders in the market,” shares Miguel Reyes, Director of Technological Infrastructure at AARCO. “There are things that we are already doing, and suddenly, the competition starts copying us. As soon as they start trying to copy us, we are already launching another new product. We are always at the forefront.”
After over 35 years in business, AARCO was facing massive issues with its server base. “We had 11 servers, and if they broke down, it was challenging to get spare parts,” explains Reyes. “It created flaws in our service. We had to leave some clients disconnected because the server where we had installed an application failed. We were falling into service blind spots. The challenge we were then faced with was to improve our technological infrastructure and in turn provide better service to all our clients.”
AARCO’s IT department saw two different options to solving their outdated server limitation issues, either completely replacing the servers or utilizing a cloud solution, both with their own unique sets of pros and cons.
The team considered completely replacing the servers since it required very little research or resources; just a simple remove, discard, and replace with a newer version of the existing solution. However, keeping the existing solution would leave AARCO in the past with siloed servers and no integration, which was no way for a technologically advanced organization to move forward. “Replacing our previous existing solution did not bring any benefit to our organization other than to avoid the constant bottlenecks that were already happening from the outdated technology,” says Reyes.
After the first option was dismissed, the AARCO team evaluated the possibility of utilizing a cloud solution through a third-party service provider, but quickly nixed that idea as well due to issues with slow response time that they had faced with that type of service in the past.
With both initial options not providing the AARCO team with the necessary capabilities, they became interested in Nutanix—an on-premise solution that would provide the ease of the cloud with integration through a hyperconverged infrastructure.
Juan Guzman who works in IT Infrastructure Servers and Mail at AARCO was the first at the company to identify Nutanix as a viable solution, specifically noticing citations of the solution’s ease of use.
“We were provided with emails from managers and directors of third-party technology companies who started a similar project at their facilities, and they only had good things to say about Nutanix solving this and that for them,” shares Guzmán. “Nutanix is not very well known in Mexico yet, so I relied on references from European companies as well as Nutanix’s reputation as pioneers in hyperconvergence. Nutanix worked with Dell, HP, and other leading companies in their early days, and the fact that Nutanix remains the leader in hyperconvergence speaks very well of the brand.”
“I continued to investigate and analyze Nutanix solutions, and I fell in love with the possibilities they could offer AARCO. We discarded all other alternatives, and decided Nutanix was the perfect business partner for our organization,” concludes Guzmán.
AARCO began working with Nutanix in 2020 and officially launched the project in early 2021, recently celebrating their first full year of partnership. The company currently utilizes Nutanix HCI Software (AOS) and Prism with plans to expand their utilization of Nutanix solutions in the near future.
AARCO has experienced a number of expected and unexpected outcomes from their Nutanix partnership such as improved operational efficiency through more powerful and streamlined infrastructure.
“We can fully manage our server system to give it more memory or allocate a little more disk space; making all those adjustments is tremendously easy with the platform,” shares Reyes. “The leap we took in technology with the Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure has not been matched by our competitors.”
Before Nutanix, AARCO was facing issues with downtime that led to inefficiencies and poor customer service quality that were solved after the implementation of Nutanix solutions. “If something stopped working or a component broke, it was not an easy or quick task to solve before Nutanix. We were falling into a situation where our technology platform was obsolete and prevented us from providing the quality customer service expected from a corporation like ours.”
AARCO response times improved drastically after the Nutanix implementation. “The response time for an incident with our previous infrastructure was between 72 hours and one week depending on the severity of the case,” shares Reyes. “Now with Nutanix, we solve it in 10 minutes—it is amazing. I have no words to explain how easy Nutanix has made it for us, it improved our response time by 1000%.”
The improved AARCO response time was thanks in part to the fact that with Nutanix, issues with their IT system were easily identifiable and the correct solution could be quickly implemented by their team. “Nutanix has APIs that show you the full relationship of your software, so that you can quickly identify a problem and apply the correct solution,” says Reyes. “We did not have that before under our previous structure, and we did not expect Nutanix to give us such a simple way to identify issues.”
Ease and speed of service for AARCO customers has improved as well with the organization’s app that once took a minute and 20 seconds to load, only taking 25 seconds after partnering with Nutanix.
Additionally, the pandemic combined with the success of the Nutanix partnership spurred AARCO to change the way they were working. “We knew that our employees needed mobility because most of them were connecting from home to the computers that we had in the offices,” shares Reyes. “We decided to give our employees completely secured work laptops and the extra security involved in giving them those kinds of tools.”
The changes for AARCO collaborators also sparked the organization’s desire to begin a remote desktop project for clients that would allow them to be able to connect and gain complete access to all AARCO information and tools while being adequately protected on AARCO servers supported by Nutanix.
“Our collaborators’ salaries are based both on an as-is, fixed rate and the number of transactions processed,” Reyes details. “With part of their pay dependent on productivity, our clients are concerned with our applications running as smoothly and quickly as possible. Our remote desktop solution supported by Nutanix allows our clients to now be able to work directly on our servers and the information flows like a racing car. We have had positive comments from our clients talking about the benefits of the new Nutanix infrastructure.”
With the success of their partnership, AARCO plans to expand their utilization of Nutanix solutions in the future within multiple facets of their organization.
Although AARCO currently uses Nutanix clusters for data protection and recovery, they do not use all the tools offered by Nutanix, but plan to start integrating them as the need arises. “We are going to move forward little by little. We plan to set up a cluster in another location to make our applications flow faster,” says Reyes.
As a forward-focused organization, AARCO also has plans for a robotic process automation (RPA) project that Nutanix can support them in bringing to fruition. With the vast amounts of data collection AARCO must do by working to collect information from so many insurers, inputting it into their systems is very complicated.
“The intention of our RPA project is to granulate everything through the direct documents of the PDF, taking the corresponding pieces of information and starting to simulate the capture of the networks automatically, so the Nutanix platform is more than involved in achieving this,” explains Guzman.