Success Stories

Southern Trust Insurance is a privately held insurance company dedicated to providing competitively priced personal and business insurance products of the highest quality through Independent Insurance Agents. The company's solid reputation in the industry is built on their customer satisfaction and excellent relationships with independent agents.

Southern Trust (www.stins.com) began experiencing problems with their newly implemented web-based insurance quotation system - transaction response times slowed to unacceptable levels during quote and re-quote requests. With independent agents unable to process timely quote requests for clients, and another 9 -10 lines of insurance to add to the new application platform, Southern Trust needed an answer to the response time problem as soon as possible.

Nexus and its partner, RISC Networks, worked with Southern Trust's in-house IT resources to provide personal service and comprehensive analytics needed to determine the specific cause of the issues, then provide quantifiable performance metrics and specific guidance on how to solve the issue.

To begin, several discovery meetings and working sessions were performed to identify the nature of the performance problems. A detailed map of the entire infrastructure was created to outline the all the components that might be affecting performance. Service Level Analytics were performed by creating and conducting synthetic quote requests to periodically run sample quotes against the troubled web-based quotation system.

Next, Network Traffic Analytics were to capture the network traffic and correlate performance to a specific time of day, day of week, and neighboring network traffic flows. Finally, Data Center Analytics were performed, which included a comprehensive assessment of workstations, as well as both physical and virtual servers.

Using the data collected, Nexus and RISC Networks quickly pinpointed the problem as an error in the software provider's application design. This error caused the system to produce an extremely large data flow every time a quote request was processed, rather than just producing the specific piece of information needed for the quote to complete. As a result of this design problem, response times for quotes were often 60 - 80 seconds and as high as 160 seconds or more.

Armed with the network assessment results, Southern Trust was able to show their software application developer precise evidence of the response time problem. Once their software provider reviewed the network assessment data, they were able to rapidly rectify the programming error and revise their software. As a result, quote response times were reduced immediately. Rate quote requests that were taking 120 seconds or more were reduced to less than 5 seconds, with many quote responses taking less than two seconds.

Ronnie Waddleton, Network Manager, sums up Southern Trust Insurance Company’s satisfaction, “Nexus and RISC Networks performed their work quickly and professionally, with a sense of ownership and responsibility.”

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