Health insurer Bupa Australia is looking to consolidate its IT systems after completing a three-year integration effort.
Bupa had been moving former competitor MBF onto its core insurance platforms, back office and contact centre technologies since acquiring the company for $2.4 billion in 2008.
It relaunched under the single Bupa brand last year, delivering a new end-to-end web interface for customers and a single operating model for staff.
Bupa’s IT director of Australia and New Zealand, Peter Powell, said the insurer was now looking to simplify its IT environment and prepare its systems to run in the cloud.
Powell said Bupa had yet to determine how, and to what extent, it would consume cloud computing but would become “cloud-ready” in the “next few years”.
“We want to make our systems cloud-ready, so if we want to move to the cloud in future,” he explained.
Bupa currently manages an on-site production data centre in Hawthorn, Victoria, with its disaster recovery facility hosted by Fujitsu in Noble Park.
The insurer will outsource the production facility to a third party provider early next year, to coincide with its head office relocation from Hawthorn to Melbourne’s CBD.
It will also decommission a third data centre in North Ryde, NSW, which housed production and development infrastructure. This will be shared across the two outsourced facilities.
“I’m a believer of having a narrow technology footprint; it gives us agility,” Powell told iTnews.
Powell did not disclose details of Bupa’s IT budget and how its current budget compared with that of the three-year integration program, beyond that it was “appropriate”.
