A business is only as good as its ability to provide for its customers. This is true whether what is offered is a tangible commodity or a service to be rendered. Hence, with the pace of technological change, it is imperative that enterprises remain capable of moving forward while avoiding unnecessary or laborious tasks, and technologies like the cloud can help, according to Opal Perry, divisional chief information officer of claims and vice president of technology and strategic ventures at Allstate Corp.

Allstate has been reinvigorating its cloud strategy to help provide a better product and enhanced security for the company’s consumers. “We’ve got 16 million customer households. That’s a tremendous responsibility and opportunity. We’re not just replacing one way of doing things with a slightly improved way. We’re changing the way people interact and serve the customer,” she said.

Perry spoke with Stu Miniman (@stu) and John John Troyer (@jtroyer), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cloud Foundry Summit in Santa Clara, California, about the emerging possibilities for growth offered by the cloud.

Allstate expands cloud strategy

The progression of Allstate’s cloud strategy included a recent partnership with Cloud Foundry — an application platform for cloud computing — to ease the process of deployment, as well as lesson the burden of infrastructure on Allstate’s developers. This allows the company to concern themselves with the task at hand — developing software — and not have to worry about the more granular parts relating to the platform itself, Perry explained.

Through its cloud evolution, Allstate has gained a greater ability to perform in a less convoluted environment, Perry stated. “Let’s let infrastructure get out of the way, provide the foundation for the developers, and let the developers innovate great software for the business. But let’s let the platform take care of things,” she said.

Such developments have been neither simple nor guaranteed. Prior to the partnership with Cloud Foundry, Perry and her team worked with different technologies, which felt like “re-inventing the wheel,” she explained. Now that Allstate has found a solution it can leverage, it is “just good sense” to bring this new partner on board. Indeed, partnership is something of the word of the day for Allstate. “There are a lot of cases … where we’re working with third-party vendors and they’re increasingly offering cloud-based solutions,” she said.

Through a collaboration with security and other product teams within the company, Perry is sure that her enterprise will soon be increasing its capacity for deployment. “In the next six months to a year, we’re going to be looking at some real strong expansion of our cloud strategy,” she said, adding that this is promising because it will allow for greater “insurance, restoration and protection” of those utilizing the service.

Perry offers a metaphor to describe Allstate’s relationship to its customers and partners. “In leadership, we’re gardeners in a way, right? We’re fostering growth. … As a tree or any plant grows, it needs a variety of factors. Our customers are the sun, the reason for existing, and that’s what we’re all orbiting around. Air represent all the business opportunity, the winds of change have been blowing mightily for years,” and Cloud Foundry and the solutions it offers are “the soil in which the tree is planted,” she concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit.

Photo: SiliconANGLE