Grange Insurance increases user count by 100% and rolls out resource intensive custom applications with AppSense

Since affiliating with Integrity Insurance, Grange has been assessing ways to streamline workflows between the two companies. While continuing to operate as separate entities, the two organizations share a great deal of information throughout the lifecycle of a particular policy or claim. Applications used by both organizations are incredibly memory intensive and working out a way to streamline the systems in a way that facilitated access from both companies was proving costly.\n\nAdam Wilson, Citrix Administrator, Open Systems Area and Emerging Technologies for Grange Insurance, explained. “We run our policy and claim handling applications in a Citrix environment to minimize processing requirements at the desktop,” he said. “We wanted to roll out the applications to our affiliate, Integrity Insurance, but that would require adding three extra Citrix servers to the farm because of the nature of the applications they would be running - quite a heavy load and, therefore, a considerable expense.”\n\nGrange Insurance was already running 15 Citrix servers and wanted to see if there was any way to avoid adding three more.

Grange Insurance is a $1 billion-plus insurance company headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. Founded in 1935 to provide low-cost auto insurance for rural customers, Grange has grown into a multi-line company offering auto, home, life, business, and farm coverage through a network of independent insurance agents in Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. In 2001, Grange affiliated with Integrity Insurance, based in Appleton, Wisconsin, to expand its geographic footprint into Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.