Insignia Financial to move its entire VMware environment into the cloud

Insignia Financial, formerly known as IOOF, is set to migrate its entire VMware fleet of around 4000 machines off its own hardware and onto Google Cloud.

The financial services firm this week elected to use more Google Cloud services, after completing the build of an enterprise “data and insights” platform on BigQuery.

It will now use Vertex AI to deploy agents to help its customer service teams, and rehost its entire VMware environment, under the expanded cloud services agreement.

Insignia currently has space in three NEXTDC data centres nationally, which it uses to house its on-premises infrastructure and workloads.

“We will maintain these sites, with the aim to gradually reduce our physical footprint and adopt a ‘cloud right’ approach, placing each workload in the environment that delivers the best outcome for our business and customers,” a spokesperson for the company told iTnews.

It will now re-home VMware VMs from these data centres into Google Cloud. 

The spokesperson said Insignia would stick with VMware as its hypervisor.

“At this stage, we have no plans to change hypervisor, but we continue to monitor market developments to ensure we maintain flexibility and deliver the best value for our customers,” the spokesperson said.

Switching out the underlying infrastructure, running VMware on public cloud, is anticipated to enable “more agile service delivery with dramatically reduced operating costs,” the company said in a statement.

“Consolidating our previous VMware environments from three data centre tenancies onto Google Cloud will reduce our on-premise footprint and its associated costs, with minimal disruption to applications and services,” CTO Damien O’Donnell said.

Meanwhile, Insignia intends to embrace Vertex AI “to help customer service teams respond with greater speed, coordination, and precision.”

“Google Cloud’s agentic AI capabilities, supported by our [BigQuery] data layer, will empower our customer service teams to make high-touch, highly-personalised experiences accessible to every member,” O’Donnell said.

Insignia Financial’s chief customer officer Renee Howie said AI would help the company to “reshape how we deliver exceptional customer experiences and innovative solutions for the more than 1.5 million Australians we serve.

“From enhancing adviser productivity to designing personalised, data-driven journeys for our members, AI is helping our customers make confident, informed decisions with ease.”

A spokesperson added that personalisation “is key to how we design experiences that are relevant and meaningful for our customers.”

“We are focusing on areas where customers see the greatest value, and we will continue to adapt as their needs evolve,” the spokesperson said.

“A great example is MLC Retirement Boost, which simplifies the complexities of retirement and helps customers make confident, informed decisions.”