When King Price Insurance Co. Ltd, a short-term insurance firm based in South Africa, opened its doors in 2012, the company had a noble goal to revolutionize the policy-writing industry. Its novel approach ran counter to the common model for car insurance, where premiums increase yearly for vehicle owners.

King Price turned that model on its head by offering to actually decrease premiums every month, rationalizing that a fixed asset like a car was actually depreciating in value. But the firm’s business model relied heavily on computer systems that could change pricing quickly and issue policies soon after evaluation. And the information technology department just couldn’t keep up.

“It was literally to the point where we were detrimental to the business. Business units were losing money on a daily basis, because systems were down and they were ill-managed,” said Jacobus Steyn (pictured, right), general manager of IT operations at King Price Insurance.

In his quest for better systems management, Steyn reached out to HPE. The company’s SimpliVity hyperconverged platform offering was brought in as a proof-of-concept trial in the King Price development space. HPE’s hyperconverged all-in-one management solution for the hybrid cloud helped the insurance firm’s IT organization become an asset rather than a liability for the business.

Steyn stopped by the set of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and spoke with co-hosts Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Peter Burris (@plburris) during the HPE Discover EU event in Madrid, Spain. He was joined by Jesse St. Laurent (pictured, left), chief technologist of hyperconverged systems at Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. They discussed how HPE’s SimpliVity solution helped bring order to chaos, the positive impact for developers, and King Price’s future plans. (* Disclosure below.)

New hyperconverged environment thrives

“Everybody realizes that it’s easier to provision, it’s more agile for the development team, it’s easier for IT, and suddenly the old environment atrophies and the new environment keeps growing,” St. Laurent said.

Agility for developers proved to be a major plus for the King Price IT management team. “The fact that we can have environments up and running within hours, that’s definitely a measure of improvement for them,” Steyn said. “Infrastructure is no longer a show stopper for the development team.”

In addition to plans for international expansion, King Price is also introducing a new product to cover businesses in the event of a cyberattack. The company’s continued growth will likely put more pressure on its IT department to meet increased demand.

“If we can give IT cycles back to focus on things that return value to the business, that’s the goal at the end of the day,” St. Laurent concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the HPE Discover EU event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the HPE Discover EU event. Neither Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE