 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, the digital experience. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got two guests with me here today. Ryan Dennings joins us, Manager of ECM Solutions at Auto Owners Insurance Company. Ryan, welcome to the program. Thank you. And Michelle Christensen is here as well. VP of Enterprise Report Management Practice at Enchoice. Michelle, it's good to have you on the program. Thank you, thank you. So Ryan, let's go ahead and start with you. You guys are a customer of Enchoice and IBM. Talk to us a little bit about Auto Owners Company. I know this is Fortune 500. This was founded in 1916. You've got about nearly three million policyholders, but give us an overview of Auto Owners Insurance. Sure. So Auto Owners Insurance is an insurance company that's headquartered in Lansing, Michigan. We write insurance in 26 states throughout the United States, despite our name being Auto Owners Insurance, which is how we started. We write all personal lines, commercial lines, and also have a life insurance company. So comprehensive across those nearly three million policyholders. Michelle, tell us a little bit about Enchoice I know this, you guys are an IBM Gold Business Partner, but this is Enchoice's first time on theCUBE, so give us a background. Sure, sure, great. So Enchoice are an IBM Gold Business Partner. We have had 28 years success with IBM as a business partner. Our headquarters are in Austin, Texas and Tempe, Arizona, as well as Shelton, Connecticut. We cover all of North America and we are 100% focused on the IBM Digital Business Automation Space. We have about 500 customers now that we've helped through the years and we continue to be a leading support provider as well as an implementation partner with all the IBM solutions. And talk to me a little bit, Michelle, about how it is that you work with Auto Owners. So we assisted Auto Owners recently in their digital transformations journey and they were dealing with an antiquated product and wanted to get moving forward, provide a better customer satisfaction experience for their clients, agents. And so we partnered with them and with IBM and bringing them a Content Manager on Demand solution as well as Navigator and several other products within the IBM Digital Business Automation Portfolio. Excellent, Ryan. Oh, sorry, Michelle, go ahead. Nope, that's fine. All right, Ryan, tell us a little bit about Auto Owners, your relationship with IBM and choice and how is it helping you to address some of the challenges in the market today? Sure, so Auto Owners has a long-term relationship with IBM, originally starting decades ago as a mainframe customer and then more recently helping us with different modern technology initiatives. They were instrumental in the 90s when we created our initial web offerings and then more recently they've been helping us with our digital business automation, which has helped us to mature our content offering at Auto Owners. So you have had a long-standing relationship with IBM, Ryan, then you mentioned the 90s, I thought, ah, a time when we didn't have to wear masks on our faces, so a couple of decades it goes back, yeah? Yes, for sure. Yes, even further than that, back into the 70s from the mainframe side of things. Ah, the 70s, another good time, all right. So Michelle, talk to me a little bit about what N-Choice is doing with IBM Solutions to help Auto Owners from a digital transformation perspective. As I said, this is a company that was founded in 1916 and I always love to hear how history companies like that are actually working with technology companies to facilitate the transformation to a lot harder than it sounds. Well, that's correct, yes. As I mentioned, we're focused on helping customers develop their strategy, their digital strategy and creating those transformative solutions. So we're helping organizations like Auto Owners with their journey. By first realizing their existing digital state, what challenges they might have and what needs they might need. And then we break that down or we deconstruct those technical and processations. And finally, we reinvent their strategic offering with modern capabilities. So we're focused on technologies like RPA, machine learning, artificial intelligence. They're more efficient, scalable and secure. So any way we can bring those technologies into the equation, we go for it. So this offers us our clients smarter and more intuitive interfaces, creating basically a better user experience and a better user experience then becomes disruptive to their competition. So they gain a better place in the market space. Ryan, talk to us about that process as much as you were involved in it. I like that Michelle said, we kind of look at the environment, we deconstruct it and then we reinvent it. Talk to me about how IBM and Enchoise has helped Auto Owners to do that so that your digital infrastructure is much more modern and I presume much more resilient when there are market dynamics like we're living in now. Yeah, for sure. So we've gone through a couple of transformation journeys at Auto Owners with IBM. When I started the team about seven years ago, we originally started using file nuts and data cap and case manager and content navigator as our first movement from a traditional platform that we had for content management into a more modern platform. And that helped us a lot to improve our business process, improve how we capture content and bring it into the system and make it actionable. More recently, we've been working with Michelle and the Enchoise team on our migration to content management on demand platform. And that's really going to be transformative in terms of how we're able to present content and documents and bills to our agents and customers to be able to transform that content and show it in ways that are important for our customers to be able to see it to engage with Auto Owners in a digital era. So Ryan, just a couple of questions on that. Is that a facilitation of the digitization of processes that had some paper involved? Because you guys have about 48,000 agents. So a lot of folks, a lot of content, tell me a little bit more about how the content manager on demand, for example, and what you're doing with ECM, how is that really revolutionizing and driving part of that digital transformation? Sure, so there's two parts to that in terms of that content management on demand journey. One is the technology portion of it that IBM's provided and that suite of software gives us some functionality that we haven't had in the past, specifically some functionality around searching and searchability of our content that will make it easier for people to find the content that they're looking for, ability to implement records management policies and other things that help us manage that content more effectively, as well as some different options to be able to present the content to our customers and agents in a better and more modern way. And choice's role in that has really been to guide us on that journey to help us make the right choices along the way on the project and help us get to a successful implementation and production. Excellent. Michelle, talk to me about hybrid cloud, AI data, big theme of IBM think this year. How is N-Choice using hybrid cloud and AI? You mentioned some of the ways, but kind of break into that a little bit more about how you're helping customers like auto owners and others really take advantage of those modern technologies. Sure, sure. So of course with the cloud pack offerings that IBM has come forward with and where we focus in the cloud pack for automation, several of those offerings are, some of them are built specifically to survive or to be hosted in a hybrid environment. And as we're working with auto owners, transforming their platforms going forward, for example, they just invested in a, I just lost the word here. They just invested in a new platform, mainframe platform where they're going to be leveraging the red hat. And from there, they'll drive forward into containerization. So Ryan mentioned some of the ways that we'll be presenting the content for his agents and his customers. And in particular, that entire viewing platform itself can be moved to a containerization state. So it's gonna be a lot easier for him to transition into that and to maintain it and to manage it. And of course, just that whole ease of function around it will be a lot easier. So we are in our area as an IBM business partner, we work with these solutions to try to stay ahead of them again to try to be able to assist our customers to understand what makes sense. When is it time to move into those? It's great to take advantage of the new stuff, but nobody wants to be the bleeding game, we wanna be the leading game. And so that's some of the areas we focus with our clients to really stay tight with the labs, tight with IBM and understanding their strategies and convey those and educate our customers on those. Excellent, leading edge. Ryan, talk to me a little bit, I love this, a bank, sorry, an insurance company from the early 1900s, moving into using container technology, I love stories like that. Talk to me a little bit about Hybrid Cloud AI and how those technologies are going to be facilitators of the continuation of the digital transformation and probably enabling more opportunities for your agents to meet more needs from your policy holders. Yeah, for sure. So first and foremost, we were a Red Hap OpenShift customer before IBM acquired them and we were doing microservices development and things like that on the platform. And then we were super excited about IBM's digital business automation strategy to move to a cloud pack and have that available for software products to run on OpenShift. At the end of last year, we updated our licensing so that we can move in that direction and we're starting to deploy digital business automation products on our OpenShift platform, which is super exciting for me. It's going to make for faster upgrades, more scalability, just a lot of ease of use things for my team to make their jobs easier, but also easier for us to adopt new upgrades and software offerings from IBM. There's also a number of products that are in the containerized or OpenShift only offering as they're initially coming out, whether it's mobile capture or automated document processing, same a couple. And those are both things that we're looking at at odd owners to continue to mature in this space and be able to offer more functionality to our associates, our customers and our agents to continue to grow the business. Very forward thinking. Awesome, Rand. Thanks for sharing with us what auto owner's insurance is doing, how you're being successful and how you've done so much transformation already. I want to throw the last question to Michelle. Take us out, Michelle, with what's next from N-Choice's perspective in terms of your digital transformation? Well, we have been 100% focused on helping all of our customers develop their digital strategy and creating their own transformative solutions. So as we continue to work with our clients, take them through the journey, as I mentioned before, we try to encourage them not to focus on the technology itself but really to focus on creating their exceptional customer experience when driving their digital strategy. And we see ourselves as helping transform our clients' experience such that customer experience becomes what N-Choice does best. So we see not only our own organization going through the transformation but making sure that we're taking our clients with us. And with 500 clients, we're really busy. So that's always good. That is good. It sounds like the last year has been very fruitful for you. And I love that you mentioned customer experience, Michelle, I think that is so important. And as well as employee experience but having a good customer experience, especially these days, table stakes. I thank you both so much for sharing what you guys are doing with IBM Solutions, the transformation that both of your companies are on and we look forward to hearing what's to come. Thank you both for your time. Thank you. Thank you. For Ryan Dennings and Michelle Christensen, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, a digital experience.