Classic Car Insurer Uses Stratusphere UX to Re-engineer Workspace Management To Cut Costs While Maintaining Quality Service
Specialty automotive insurer Hagerty sought a solution that would collect end-to-end data it needed to get better visibility into its VMware Horizon environment. Stratusphere UX provided the data collection and connectivity Hagerty needed to get to the next level of desktop visibility, performance, and support. Stratusphere UX seamlessly combines data from VMware Horizon, Microsoft Intune (formerly Endpoint Manager) and ServiceNow for a Microsoft Azure environment. In Azure, Hagerty runs analytics and creates dashboards so the support team can keep virtual and physical desktops monitored, compliant and optimized, whether users are in the enterprise, working from home or at another remote location.
Hagerty specializes in insuring antique and collectible cars and is the world’s largest membership organization for car lovers. It operates in a small niche of the automotive insurance industry but is a high-growth company – in the span of approximately one year the company went public and signed a partnership with one of the largest national auto insurers. That left the desktop support team with a much higher workload but without a corresponding increase in staff. The company is undergoing exponential growth, and that forced it to get creative in how they provided workspace support. The IT team focuses on developing automations to manage as much desktop support as possible. That requires getting timely, in-depth visibility into desktop performance – and for Hagerty's purposes, it required access to endpoint data that the VMware Horizon environment could not provide.
IT staff ultimately selected Stratusphere UX digital experience monitoring and diagnostics solution from Liquidware. Stratusphere UX enabled Hagerty to achieve next-level automation and desktop performance analytics, new performance dashboards that reduced its software licensing costs, and more. Without Stratusphere UX, Hagerty experienced limitations both with VMware Horizon and Intune, including the inability to capture the serial numbers of devices being monitored. That, and other visibility blind spots, created challenges for Hagerty IT staff when it wanted to see available RAM in specific desktops before pushing a security patch, or to warranty status before determining how to manage service. VMware Horizon provided different visibility than Intune, but its latency was a problem. Hagerty’s offshore developers couldn’t consistently or easily get into VMware Horizon to access the performance data they needed to guide their work. The desktop support team was also disappointed with the performance data visibility, and often had to spend considerable time investigating common performance issues such as slow user logins or network performance.
Hagerty licensed Stratusphere UX for desktop performance and user experience monitoring and used its included API Builder to create the integration it needed with Intune to automatically collect, report, and process the desired data. API Builder 2.0 helps administrators easily build API strings to extract data by graphically displaying API options and rendering a table from the data at the bottom of the screen. It allows users to save progress, view histories, go back to previous states and import existing Stratusphere UX API strings.
Savings on tasks like these made it possible for Hagerty’s desktop team to continue to provide quality support as the company evolved. Carroll’s team now spends much of its time developing new automations to support the environment. Their next initiative is to integrate with Hagerty’s ServiceNow system to create more visibility and automation capabilities. Stratusphere UX has been certified by ServiceNow and is available in the ServiceNow Store. It lets users easily customize their ServiceNow experience to include Stratusphere UX data that is unique to their operations. Hagerty already uses input from Stratusphere UX to automatically generate some types of service tickets and will have many more possibilities to automate asset management, reporting and more after learning more about ServiceNow integration.
