ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 13, 2019 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Primerica, Inc., a leading insurance and financial services company, has turned to IBM to help accelerate innovation and modernize their internal and customer-facing application development in a hybrid cloud environment.

Insurance providers are increasingly turning to the cloud to accelerate expansion into untapped markets and deliver innovative business and end-user experiences. By some estimates, more than 70 percent of insurers today leverage some form of cloud infrastructure, up from 20 percent just a few years ago, according to Novarica. Hybrid cloud environments in particular are suited to the needs of insurers, which are often sitting on decades of investment in their existing IT and face the need to balance scalability and agility with data security and regulatory requirements.

With millions of lines of code in applications like Primerica's sales representative portal, intranet, and Primerica.com, Primerica reports that their monolithic application architectures previously limited development speed and time to market, as enhancements and innovations required full application rebuilds, which could take months to a year or more.

To accelerate this process, Primerica tapped IBM's hybrid cloud capabilities and expertise. Working with the IBM Garage team, Primerica was able to design a hybrid cloud strategy to modernize their applications on IBM's hybrid multicloud platform. As a result, the company was able to migrate their business applications, including WebSphere, to a private cloud in their data center.  

Now, Primerica can keep sensitive data secured on-premise, while also gaining access to the advanced cloud technologies they need, such as containers and microservices, to help build and modernize software with greater speed. For example, they now have the tools to more easily and quickly update the client portal for a better customer experience.

"We'd worked with IBM for decades, and the time came to modernize our applications," said Barry Pellas, CTO and EVP Application Development and Delivery, Primerica. "We knew IBM could execute on a strategic transformation roadmap to help us get the most out of new technologies like Kubernetes and eventually bring all of Primerica's applications into a hybrid cloud environment to speed development."

"By design, companies in the insurance industry have decades of data and mission critical workloads spread across a variety of environments," said Katie Kean, VP, IBM Garage. "As they seek to innovate faster to meet the evolving needs of their customers, iconic companies like Primerica are turning to IBM for help implementing hybrid cloud strategies and solutions, learning new ways of working to modernize applications, and tapping into data secured across any cloud environment — public, private, or traditional on-premises."

Today's announcement adds to the list of leading insurers like Prudential Singapore, Allianz Taiwan and American Association of Insurance Services (AAIS) that are driving growth and innovation with IBM Cloud.

About IBM Cloud
For more information about IBM, visit https://www.ibm.com/cloud.

About IBM Garage: The IBM Garage is the only co-creation experience that drives purposeful innovation and transformational change with the speed of a start-up at the scale of an enterprise. With an IBM Garage experience, clients move faster, work smarter, ideate more rapidly, and fundamentally change the DNA of the way they work. To learn more, visit: https://www.ibm.com/cloud/garage/.

About Primerica

Primerica, Inc., headquartered in Duluth, GA, provides financial services to middle-income households in North America. Primerica licensed representatives educate their clients about how to better prepare for a more secure financial future by assessing their needs and providing appropriate solutions through term life insurance, mutual funds, annuities and other financial products. Primerica insured approximately 5 million lives and had over 2 million client investment accounts at December 31, 2018. Primerica, through its insurance company subsidiaries, was the #2 issuer of Term Life insurance coverage in North America in 2018. Primerica stock is included in the S&P MidCap 400 and the Russell 1000 stock indices and is traded on The New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "PRI."

Contact:
Tyler Allen
IBM Media Relations
tballen@us.ibm.com

SOURCE IBM