During its rapid business expansion, santalucía had acquired a multitude of different IT systems and applications, all requiring very specific and costly maintenance and management. santalucía migrated most of its operating systems to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, providing the business with an efficient and stable technological backbone that supports core processes to enable further growth.
Overview
santalucia is an insurance firm established over 92 years ago and specializes in safe-guarding people’s assets. The company reports profits of over EUR 100 million, investments of over EUR 4,000 million and a wide portfolio of products. santalucia specializes in providing solutions for families, and its highly customer-centric outlook means that it is committed to delivering impeccable customer service. The company is a leader in the Death and Assistance Insurance sector, with market shares of 30.89 percent, and is also a prominent player in other insurance areas.
The Challenge
While business expansion generates exciting opportunities to open up new revenue streams, it can also make it necessary for companies to revise existing processes and operations, with a view to maximizing efficiency and eliminating unnecessary cost.
This was precisely the challenge that santalucia was facing. “Managing and maintaining what had gradually become a heterogeneous IT environment was proving complex and costly for us, and leveraging our legacy systems was simply no longer viable. We were spending far too much time on system updates and upgrades.
“Because of this we chose to look for a more efficient and profitable way of providing the company with the technology required to facilitate business expansion.”
“The migration process was performed very gradually and smoothly over the course of two years."
SUSE Solution
santalucia reviewed the leading open source operating systems available on the market and soon concluded that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server was the ideal solution for them.
“The SUSE operating system was the solution that offered the best value for money and the required stability and capacity for us to carry out a pain-free migration.”
The company chose to migrate the majority of its existing operating systems to SUSE Liberty Linux, with SUSE Manager providing complete lifecycle management and control for the estate of Linux servers.
SUSE Liberty Linux enables santalucia to access expert support from SUSE for its remaining instances of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well as for its SUSE servers.
“The migration process was performed very gradually and smoothly over the course of two years.”
santalucia leverages SUSE Linux Enterprise Server to provide a resilient, trusted and solid foundation for its core business applications—such as Tomcat application servers and Oracle Application Server—which in turn enable the company to keep implementing plans and strategies for growth.
To manage updates and patches rapidly and consistently, santalucia uses SUSE Manager, which also offers automated provisioning of virtual servers and enhances system security and control.
The Results
With the SUSE solutions in place, santalucia’s business-critical applications have the efficiency, stability and reliability they need to support continuous corporate growth.
“Thanks to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and SUSE Manager we have boosted productivity and slashed the costs connected with managing and maintaining a complex, heterogeneous environment of multiple operating systems. This allows santalucia to keep pursuing its ambitious expansion plans.”
By increasing capacity and scalability in its Linux landscape, the company can now respond to new deployment requests in a faster, more effective way.