Description: Scalable SaaS Platform – Property Insurance Market

High Level Summary:

GeoDigital created a market pioneering SaaS application utilized by premium US insurance companies to provide a Photo Acquisition Service (PAS) system to provide on-the-fly imagery and extrapolated engineering metrics for roofing claims.  API integration provided the customer’s agents with the ability to receive zip bundles of imagery along with PDF descriptors of building dimensions, including pitch, slope and height via single click integration to customer’s proprietary Line of Business (LoB) application.

Objective:

Primary objective was to design, architect, and develop a fully sustainable and scalable SaaS infrastructure that could grow vertically and horizontally as utilization increased with the growth of customer of the customer base, and could grow in feature functionality as additional market requirements were serviced.
Secondary objectives required compliance to client security requirements, ease of data mining of usage, efficient backups of data and client access audit tracking metrics, and a high level of tolerance to support a 99.9% uptime SLA.

Challenges and Risk Mitigation:

Architectural and process challenges were of significant impact as this was a new market venture for a pioneering product, and the organization’s historical was focus was LiDAR and engineering.  Extensive pre-planning was required, with constant agile adjustments to the teams and progress as the organization grew into the requirements, leveraging internal resources as well as technical partners and vendors.  A cross-departmental tiger team was created to support the overall management of development progress, SDLC release cycles, infrastructure architecture and implementation, and scheduled maintenance.
During the early development stages, we worked closely with an early adopter and faced multiple struggles with initial go-live release and product readiness.  To mitigate a direct and tangible risk with the customer, I worked closely with the teams on a daily basis, providing daily status updates to the primary client, significantly enhancing client buy-in, tolerance to development issues and delayed releases and generally enhancing client-supplier relations.  The client was kept abreast of internal issues with comprehensive and detailed Root Cause Analysis (RCA’s,) provided with fully detailed resolution and mitigation documentation and processes to provide a high level of transparency and build an on-going relationship.

Technologies and Methodologies Involved:

• RackSpace Cloud – Cloud Compute, Cloud Load Balancer, Cloud Network, Cloud Storage
• Google Compute Cloud – Cloud Compute, Cloud Storage
• CentOS 6 Linux
• Windows 2012 R2
• Microsoft IIS and SSL Certificates
• PostgreSQL Database with GIS extensions
• PowerShell
• Bash
• Waterfall Project Management