MMG Insurance

Why would a company with plenty of IT talent on staff choose to work with an IT solutions company? For MMG Insurance, its 10-year partnership with Workgroup Technology Partners (WGTECH) has enabled it to extend its IT expertise without expanding its payroll, and deploy the advanced IT solutions that enable it to grow its business. MMG Insurance, based in Presque Isle, offers a wide variety of property and casualty insurance to protect both personal and business assets. With 160 employees serving customers in Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Pennsylvania, the firm supports a large geographic area. It has a talented IT department comprised of 22 professionals who focus on programming the industry-specific applications MMG needs to maintain its business edge as well as managing day-to-day IT issues, including network administration

“We write all of our own applications, and they are mission critical to us. We invest in people on our team to develop those applications, and call in WGTECH for high-level IT support issues,” says Stacy Shaw, VP and Information Systems Manager, MMG Insurance. “They come up with ideas to help us grow.”

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Listen to MMG Insurance share how it works with WGTECH for high-level IT support, and for quick incident response and resolution.

Some examples of how MMG Insurance has relied on this partnership include for tech planning, as a ”sanity check” on IT plans, to identify alternative options, to procure technology equipment and software, and as an advanced problem resolution team.

Specific solutions include:

• A NetApp storage solution that is reliable and scalable, and offers great deduplication technology that saves nearly 70% of storage in virtual environments. According to Shaw, the new NetApp solution “enables us to do more with less, and efficiently use the resources we have.”
• A VMware deployment that cuts the need for physical servers, eliminating the old “one server, one application” model by running multiple virtual machines on each physical machine. “We needed more systems than we could have purchased actual servers for, so VMWare was critical, and enabled us to grow at a faster pace,” says Shaw.
• Redundant Internet connections to ensure that MMG is always accessible to its agents and customers.

For MMG Insurance, the partnership has delivered significant business benefits. “When we have a problem we can’t fix, we call; they can take care of any issue. WGTECH has become a very good partner for us—we work with the company as needed throughout the year, and don’t have to maintain that skill on staff,” says Shaw. “They are an extension of our IT team and we reach out to them when we need an expert.”

“I would recommend them to any company, small or large,” says Shaw. “They are a reliable partner for us.”