AXA builds the software-defined future with hyperconverged infrastructure and managed services

Vision

Creating a customer-centric technology roadmap

As a leader in financial services, AXA needs to ensure that they can keep pace with evolving customer expectations. Today's customers expect the same level of service from all the companies they interact with, looking for innovative use of technology and instant access to information.

To ensure they could continue to meet these expectations, AXA Luxembourg decided to update critical components of their IT infrastructure, addressing key performance concerns, and ensuring that they put an architecture in place that would meet future demands.

Olivier Vansteelandt, CIO, AXA Luxembourg explains that there were four key priorities for the company from the outset. "We had clear expectations from a new architecture. We needed to meet the performance demands of our users and customers, meet cost reduction targets while ensuring it was both highly available and secure."

"With our former infrastructure, we didn't have the levels of high availability that we expected. When people are used to getting everything they want delivered to their door the next day with three clicks, they expect the same from their insurance company."

The new solution needed to accelerate the deployment of new services and position them to integrate cloud-based applications, while still meeting technology guidelines set by the larger AXA Group.

AXA Luxembourg had been an NTT client for a number of years and when the time came to update their infrastructure, we were able to continue this relationship, proposing a new, hyperconverged architecture to meet their needs.

Transformation

A flexible and agile infrastructure architecture

The hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), built on technology from Dell and VMware, enables AXA Luxembourg to embrace a fully managed service. This managed service allowed us to create a hyperconverged environment tailored to their needs rather than relying on a standardized HCI architecture.

With the infrastructure hosted in our Luxembourg data center, we’re able to manage the day-to-day operations of the platform, enabling them to focus on advancing their application strategy and delivering the greatest value to the business.

Critical to AXA Luxembourg was transitioning to a future-proof architecture without having to migrate their key legacy applications from their current operating environment. The software-defined nature of the hyperconverged environment enabled these applications to access all the performance and security benefits of the new infrastructure without AXA Luxembourg needing to move them to a new operating environment.

This flexibility provides them with the freedom to decide how best to evolve these applications and what operating environment will best suit them in the future, embracing a fully hybrid model.

Working with Dell and VMware, AXA Luxembourg can combine the hyperconverged infrastructure with our managed services, enabling them to deploy an environment that exactly meets their needs.

Results

A solution to meet the needs of the hybrid future

Leveraging their new hyperconverged infrastructure, AXA is ideally positioned to take the lead in the digital transformations of the insurance industry, meeting the evolving needs of their customers. The new platform delivers high availability, for both new and legacy applications, setting the stage for the hybrid future.

Performance revolution

AXA is already seeing the performance benefits from the move to the hyperconverged solution. "We're seeing a 100% improvement in the time it takes to run some of our key processes and backups are now completed three times faster," says Vansteelandt. "This was a key priority for us and it's already delivering."

The power of partnership

The long-standing relationship between AXA and NTT means that there is a strong cultural alignment between the two organizations. "The way people work, collaborate and innovate in both companies is very similar," he says. "We trust the team at NTT, they understand our vision and are focused on helping us achieve it."

A focus on sustainability

Aside from meeting AXA's operational needs, the hyperconverged infrastructure allows them to contribute to their sustainability goals, ensuring they can reduce the impact of their operations, through reduced power consumption and accelerated rollout of digital services.

A hybrid approach for the future

AXA can set the course for a future where their applications are sourced through an ecosystem of providers, including partners, the AXA group and their internal applications. "We need to be flexible and agile while still ensuring that we meet security and compliance requirements. Our new infrastructure enables us to do this, and so much more," he says.