Asurion CEO Steve Ellis and CIO Barry Vandevier took the stage this morning at TUCON 2013 with a great story of our times. We live in a world increasingly dependent on mobile devices. In fact, we’ve reached a point that when technology fails, our daily routine is out of balance at work and at home. Knowing that, Asurion provides consumers with a safety net for their devices, typically offered through partnerships with retail stores, both online and in brick and mortar locations.
In the event that a customer’s device is lost, stolen, or damaged, Asurion is able to replace the device in a matter of hours. In fact, Asurion bets their business on the speed with which they can serve their customers, and also the quality of the experience for their customers and partners.
This is a complex challenge for Asurion, as the possibility of fraud is ever-present, and knowing location, suspect behaviors, and other patterns is the key to responding to customers with confidence. Asurion made the choice to partner with TIBCO for integration and process because they found TIBCO’s Active Matrix and integration products to be uniquely capable of running such complex operations.
Asurion’s Path Ahead
While they are the service of choice in the U.S., Asurion sees fantastic opportunities for growth in Asia and in Europe. “There’s no question this is a global game and our strategy is to take our 200 million customers to 1 billion,” says CEO Steve Ellis. And they have plenty of reason to be optimistic: Mobile networks are capable of supporting bandwidth in new ways like streaming media across many separate devices. Also, software is quickly moving toward allowing consumers to configure their own lives, and that data and configuration is also an important candidate for protection.
This growth in mobile computing is the phenomena of our time, and it only took 12.5 years for smartphones to penetrate the global population to 55%. This has been a faster adoption rate than any piece of technology in history and represents an enormous amount of human and technology change. Asurion recognizes that mobility is their challenge, but are also investing in cloud and Big Data technology. They’re doing this while building out an infrastructure that is flexible enough to support the expected growth in all three areas.
We live in a world intolerant of downtime and Asurion’s services are a very interesting offering.
This post first appeared on The TIBCO Blog and has been lightly edited.
