Allstate Corp (NYSE:ALL) is expanding its reach beyond vehicle and property insurance by taking advantage of cloud technology to create new businesses through CompoZed Labs.
The insurance company has been doing very well in its main business and that is evident by the fact that it was ranked number 84 on the Fortune 500 list for 2017. Allstate’s insurance has more than $36 billion in revenue and does not want to stop there. The insurance firm is one of the many companies that have been venturing beyond their main line of business so that they can embrace and take advantage of the opportunities brought by technology.
Venturing into the software industry
The company launched the new unit called CompoZed Labs in 2014. The new startup was aimed at supporting the creation of new software services. This not only allowed Allstate to compete more effectively against other insurance firms, it also pushed the company into the technology space, allowing it to compete against other startups such as Uber and Airbnb.
Doug Safford, the VP of technology innovation at Allstate revealed that CompoZed Labs deals with roughly 40 percent of all the software developments at the insurance company. It takes advantage of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a platform used to develop applications that can be hosted on the firm’s internal servers or even on could platforms operated by third parties.
The insurance company’s developers also use a tool called Jenkins to continuously carry out software changes. According to Safford, the tool provides everything that development teams need to quickly test new ideas and if they are successful then the software is developed and deployed to users. This is significantly better that the old way of creating business software where a new product would take so long to create and deploy.
“When you’re an 86-year-old company things have done a certain way, there are rules in place because of what someone did 10 years ago. Now, instead of a 200-person team, you have small six- and eight-person teams working on things. It unleashes creativity,” stated Opal Perry, the VP and divisional chief operating officer of claims at the insurance company.
Allstate stock closed the latest trading session on Monday at $89.41.
