The business environment is changing at a rapid clip, the transformation apparent and across all industries. Customers expect seamless, anytime, anywhere interactions from retailers, banks, and insurers, for instance. The amount of data coursing in and out of most organizations is exploding at astounding rates and businesses of all types are grappling to find a way to harness and use the information for informed decisions. Budgets are tight and businesses need to find efficiencies and cut costs wherever possible.

Compounding the problem is that some demographic groups-like Gen X and Millennials-have different expectations for speed and service than their Baby Boomer predecessors, with the younger generation demanding immediate responses in their online interactions. Used to rapid responses, this generation will abandon a transaction if they cannot execute it quickly and easily.

As the number and variety of communication channels proliferate, there are additional engagement points with customers. This creates more data that needs to be processed. Organizations need to better correlate this data in order to get a true 360-degree view of their customers. However, organizations also must ensure that they are able to scale to be available to customers on the platform of their choice.

In order to stay one-step ahead in the insurance sector, SE2 is making changes to deal with transformational changes. SE2 is a third party administrator and it's important to us to be on the leading edge so our insurance carrier customers have the best technology that will keep them one step ahead of the competition. As a technology firm for our carriers, we ensure that while keeping costs down, we also provide the capability to scale when needed, like providing an on-demand infrastructure and support. As we scale, we still need to ensure that environments are stable and that we are still able to launch new products in a short time and can meet our customers' needs from an on-demand perspective.

SE2 has adopted VMware as our foundational software and our building block. In general, we use VMware to facilitate good software environment management that is rapid, scalable, and repeatable-and support our product development, promotion, and creation. We have chosen specific technologies within VMware that will not only strengthen our offering in the current state and near term, but also as we scale to give the private cloud opportunity to give our customers so they can scale on demand, in addition to the opportunity to move our customers into the public cloud as they demand it. These technologies provide ease and speed of provisioning, server and offer virtual desktop capacity through that private cloud capability. In addition, VMware enhances server efficiency and cost containment, and it saves time by automating common tasks.