Milliman – Going “BIG” in the Cloud with Microsoft
It’s great to see the innovation that Milliman are driving in the cloud. Paul Maher, CTO - Integrate & MG-ALFA at Milliman, and ex-colleague of mine at Microsoft is leading the Product Development team building Integrate™.
Paul Maher began his career at a small actuarial firm in the U.K., building pension software, and transitioned to IT roles and leadership positions at Microsoft, KPMG, and others prior to joining Milliman in 2013. He has a passion for building software solutions that help solve challenging business problems. Contact Paul at LinkedIn.
Paul describes Integrate…
“Integrate, an end-to-end, revolutionary cloud-based system for the life insurance market, has been built on the Microsoft Azure platform and reimagines the relationships between people, process and technology. Integrate clients are able to run large actuarial jobs on-demand year round, benefiting from the Azure platform’s scale and extensibility in a pay-as-you-go business model.
Integrate addresses the modeling and reporting requirements of Milliman clients; these requirements include large, computationally intensive workloads that can vary in size and scale across the financial year.
Integrate was built by using Azure as a platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and delivered to our clients as a turnkey software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. We received multiple benefits by running Integrate on Azure, such as:
- Faster time-to-market
- Reduced costs
- Increased scalability
- More flexibility and creativity
Integrate benefits from the Microsoft Azure cloud platform capabilities such as compute power and storage, as well as feature-rich services such as Azure Data Factory and HDInsight.
We are also expanding the capabilities of Integrate to include technologies such as:
- Azure Batch - Enables running of large-scale parallel and high performance computing (HPC) applications efficiently in the cloud. By using the Batch service, we can configure batch workloads to run in Azure on demand or on a schedule, and not worry about the complexity of configuring and managing an HPC cluster, VMs, or a job scheduler.
- Power BI – For surfacing our data in a rich and interactive way, to enable the end user to have the best experience reviewing and analyzing data delivered by Integrate, to support the financial reporting process.
Milliman has had great success winning new clients and onboarding existing clients to the cloud. We have seen our clients increase compute hours more than 600 percent to about 45 million computer hours on grids as large as 50,000 cores, and achieve more than 99.99 percent job completion ratio.
For further information, please use the following resources: