In mid-September travel insurer and emergency assistance provider Seven Corners shut down its last non-virtualized server and reached 100% virtualization from data center to desktop. It had to do that, says company CIO George Reed at the NetApp Customer Day in AT&T Park during VMworld 2012. It was the only way to support the company’s explosive growth both in income, customer base, and number of products.

It achieved its 100% virtualization and a complete forklift upgrade of its data center in just 22 months while simultaneously supporting huge growth. Founded in 1993, it now has 850 products ranging from insurance packages of all kinds for travelers – both U.S. residents traveling abroad and foreign travelers, students, and others living in the United States on temporary visas – to rescue services for U.S. travelers lost in Africa. Earlier this year it pioneered an acute onset major medical service that includes medical evacuation of a stricken traveler back to the United States, and in September it was developing a telemedicine service. Its business quadrupled in the first six months of 2012 alone.

It simply could not support this business growth and complexity – and the huge data growth at its heart – on its old system, which Reed described to Wikibon’s David Vellante in an interview at NetApp Customer Day at VMworld 2012 as “an archaic server-based system that frankly was worthy of the Mayans.” Seven Corners upgraded to “cutting edge servers, storage, and communications equipment” based on Cisco servers and networking and NetApp storage, and most recently FlexPod, and then virtualized it with VMware out of shear necessity.

“What that means is I used to have six people in infrastructure and desktop,” Reed said. “By virtualizing the server room, and the desktops, and the telephone system, I now have two, and we’re more responsive and more effective than we used to be.” The ability to clone the entire software system to a new data center anywhere “at the click of a button” on a few minutes, which VMware was demonstrating at the conference as an upcoming new feature, will give Reed more flexibility to support the company’s continuing rapid growth.

Seven Corners standardized on Cisco servers before they had built a track record, a gamble which has paid off. “We’ve been using them in production for two years now, and we have yet to have to replace as much as a chip in one of the blades,” Reed said.

NetApp was another important choice. “They have a complete array of products that I can monitor and manage from one screen. I don’t need a host of people to manage a bunch of data controllers that are going to be scattered all over North America.”

The entire upgrade and virtualization cost $700,000, and Reed estimates that it has save the company $110,000 a month for the 22 months since the upgrade began. “There’s your ROI”.

But savings are only part of the story. The real benefit, he says, is the tremendous increase in flexibility to support new products and take advantage of and in some cases drive change in the company’s industry. Being first in the market with a new product usually means that the market leader captures 70% of the business. So for instance when Seven Corners introduced its acute onset major medical product, it “ambushed the travel insurance business. Nobody does this kind of service because it’s too high risk because you can’t respond fast enough,” he said. “Naturally a carrier wants to turn the service off if it goes south. We were able to turn the product on in two days, and it’s just been a boom.”

Reed has no figures on how much of the company’s business growth has been made possible by the extreme flexibility of its virtualized, high-end IT environment. But he sees a huge market for its new telemedicine service, from allowing a doctor in the United States to provide a consult to a patient traveling in Kenya to a hospital in Atlanta providing treatment to patients in a prison in Florida. The system will allow everything to be done live from transmitting MRI results to discussing symptoms and courses of treatment with the patient and family, to ordering that treatment.

In September, Seven Corners was developing a Cloud-based universal insurance quote system that will let anyone get a quote on anything from medical insurance for a foreign student in the United States to theft coverage for valuables a U.S. traveler plans to take to Kenya automatically online in a few minutes. All of that is possible because of the advanced IT technology that Seven Corners can bring to the table.