Jewelers Mutual

Industry

Insurance

Customer Environment

Windows Servers, VMWare, On-Premise Datacenters

Challenges

  • On-premise configurations were managed manually
  • Environments were inconsistent, creating inefficiency within IT teams
  • Needed a unified configuration management solution that all areas of IT could easily use

Results

  • Decreased time to create an environment from four to six weeks to under a day
  • Created consistency across environments
  • Increased overall productivity across IT teams by providing an intuitive, easy-to-use configuration management solution

Puppet Enterprise Empowers IT Teams to Achieve Efficiency

Jewelers Mutual Insurance Company is an insurer and services provider in Neenah, Wisconsin dedicated to insuring jewelry and the jewelry industry. By utilizing Puppet Enterprise, it was able to implement stronger DevOps practices, decrease the time it took to spin up new IT resources, and provide intuitive configuration management at scale for its teams.

Jewelers Mutual realized that it needed to increase the speed and quality of application delivery in
a reliable way due to accelerating the delivery of new and existing applications and services, without adding additional costs for resources to manage the environments. Processes like manually building 30 servers per environment slowed IT down and was costly over time.

Before finding a sustainable DevOps solution, Jewelers Mutual allocated many resources with

specialized talent as a way to meet the constant needs of creating infrastructure and then decommissioning it when no longer needed. For example, the company employed several people
to fill quality assurance roles just to test these environments each time one was manually created, which was a huge expenditure for the company that added up quickly.

Jewelers Mutual turned to Puppet Enterprise to solve these challenges by giving its IT teams a unified infrastructure and application delivery automation tool. This also allowed IT to focus on tasks with higher business value compared to spending time on manually building, configuring, and testing environments. “We chose Puppet because whether you’re a developer or sysadmin, Puppet is intuitive and the learning curve is not steep,” said Jason Poquette, senior DevOps manager for Jewelers Mutual.

Zivra Speeds Up the Creation of Environments

Jewelers Mutual looked across the organization and found its IT teams were struggling with productivity, indicating that the company did not have consistency across its different environments. The time to create a new environment took four to six weeks, and even then, it still was not in full working order. The company worked with Puppet channel partner Zivra, a DevOps, cloud and IT agility consulting firm based in Chicago, to solve these challenges.

Puppet allows us to spend more time on corporate initiatives versus spending time on manually building, configuring and testing environments.

Jason Poquette, senior DevOps manager at Jewelers Mutual Insurance Company

To achieve consistency across environments, Zivra worked with Jewelers Mutual to create all the Puppet configurations needed to support Jewelers Mutual’s applications. As a result of this collaboration, Zivra helped Jewelers Mutual strengthen automation within its IT practices and decreased the time to create an environment to under one day.

“We believe Puppet Enterprise is a best-of-breed solution for companies that are looking to automate their environments,” said Arthur Alvarez, director of sales and marketing at Zivra. “It’s truly a solution that helps us offer the best service for our clients.”

Top Outcomes From Using Puppet

  • Reduced time to create an environment of about 30 servers from four to six weeks to under one day
  • Increased consistency across environments while ensuring compliance with IT policies
  • Provided IT teams an intuitive configuration management tool to increase productivity

“We believe Puppet Enterprise is a best of breed solution for companies that are looking to automate their environments. It’s truly a solution that helps us offer the best service for our clients.”

Arthur Alvarez, director of sales and marketing, Zivra

See for yourself what Puppet Enterprise can do for you.

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