Technology has reached a point where advancements are coming so rapidly that traditional upgrade cycles simply aren’t enough to stay up to date. That’s why Duck Creek Technologies has introduced Active Delivery, a cloud-native solution that leverages the power, scalability, and security of the Azure cloud to provide bi-weekly product updates.
“For our new customers and existing customers, the important consideration is that this is still our same award-winning software. The shift is the way in which it’s being delivered,” says Victoria Candelora, Director, Product Management – Policy at Duck Creek. “Instead of sending the product to customers to install on their own, we’re delivering software to our customers through the cloud with no need to ever upgrade again.”
Active Delivery isn’t a product itself, but rather a deployment method we are adding to our products to ensure that they are of the highest quality for customers. How? Let’s look at what Active Delivery is and how it benefits organizations.
What is Active Delivery?
As mentioned, Active Delivery isn’t a new version of our award-winning products, but a new addition to rapidly deliver value to our customers which provides a way for product updates to be applied seamlessly. These updates are applied automatically through the cloud, assuring there are no disruptions to an insurer’s operations while eliminating the need for additional, costly resources to manage massive upgrades.
“Updates are delivered silently at an initial cadence of every two weeks in a non-disruptive manner,” says Candelora. As a Duck Creek customer, you choose when available updates are applied. All impactful updates are “feature flagged,” allowing insurers to activate them at a time most convenient and beneficial for the business. This means your team can ensure zero impact to your production environment.
“We’re not saying the effort is completely eliminated, but you can plan for that effort,” says Candelora. “When a feature comes out, you need to manage for and plan to use this feature. You can keep the feature off, develop for it, and decide how you’re going to use it. You can even turn it on before we take the flag out if you’ve worked ahead.”
Active Delivery automates manual processes by leveraging low-code configuration tools for agile updates and enhanced speed to market for new products. Configuration allows for organizations to more quickly and simply build while ensuring that no custom code gets in the way of new updates working as intended.
These efficiencies translate into reduced expense ratios, improved core operational performance, and enhanced scalability to handle higher volumes seamlessly.
How do Insurers Benefit from Active Delivery?
The value drivers of Active Delivery come down to two major concepts: reducing lifetime total cost of ownership and giving insurers the ability to focus on driving innovation into the business of insurance.
Active Delivery eliminates the concept of an upgrade. As it stands, insurers must plan for a significant portion of time, resources, and capital, coupled with likely business disruption to adopt new features and functionality for existing software.
“We want to enable our customers to be able to react to change quickly,” says Candelora. “When insurers are on older versions of software, they aren’t adaptable. They have to plan for upgrades, design around it, and mitigate underlying technological or architectural changes from one version to another, in order to gain the value of a new upgrade.”
Active Delivery eliminates the need to spend time, resources, and capital on upgrades. Instead, a constant series of updates slowly evolve the software over time, so customers are always working on the latest version. Better yet, those updates happen automatically, quietly, and quickly, so the IT team can focus on business Innovation rather than software upkeep.
This frees up the resources typically reserved for upgrade cycles and allows organizations to spend them on more business-focused endeavors. That means your IT departments, product development groups, etc. can look ahead rather than focusing on getting outdated software and systems up to speed.
Talk to Duck Creek about Active Delivery
This article only scratches the surface of all the ways Duck Creek products with Active Delivery can help your insurance organization save money, increase productivity, and drive business goals to success. If you’d like to learn more about Duck Creek products with Active Delivery, reach out and speak to one of our sales representatives.
