Acrometis, LLC

Operating in a highly regulated industry, Acrometis must retain data for several years. To contain its costs, the company looked for an efficient, secure way to migrate and store 50TB of data.

Acrometis used IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration to rapidly transfer its historical data to IBM Cloud Object Storage for long-term retention.

Every year, workers’ compensation programs help hundreds of thousands of people (link resides outside of ibm.com) across the United States get back on their feet after workplace injuries. Before a company can pay out on a claim, adjusters must review the details and determine the appropriate level of compensation—a process that typically requires many hours of manual work.

To help insurers compensate claimants faster and more accurately, Acrometis has developed an innovative solution that automates up to 75 percent of the claims-handling process. By ingesting medical and insurance data using optical-character recognition (OCR) and analyzing the information using business logic and machine-learning algorithms, the solution can validate the facts of a case—empowering adjusters to work more efficiently.

After winning clients across the United States, Acrometis is setting its sights on further domestic and international growth. To provide the required levels of performance and availability, Acrometis decided to migrate its applications from a private cloud platform to IBM Cloud bare metal servers.

“Our applications run compute-intensive OCR, data discovery and machine-learning processes, and the performance of our virtual machines is a critical factor in serving our clients effectively,” explains Vinu Varghese, CSO/CTO at Acrometis. “IBM Cloud bare metal servers enable us to quickly spin up new environments with the RAM and CPU resources we need to meet those requirements.”

To comply with its regulators, Acrometis must securely retain its data for several years after it processes a claim. With more than 50 TB of historical data to migrate in addition to its applications, the company wanted a secure and cost-effective approach to long-term storage.

“Because of the sheer volume of data we needed to migrate, it simply wasn’t practical to run the process over our network,” explains Varghese. “To solve the challenge, we looked for a data migration and storage solution that could meet our requirements around speed, security and cost.”

Acrometis decided to use IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration to rapidly transfer its data to IBM Cloud Object Storage. By selecting the Cold Vault option in IBM Cloud Object Storage, Acrometis can store its rarely accessed data for years without sending costs soaring.

“We were confident that transporting our data in a physical device would be an efficient way to perform our migration quickly, but one of our main concerns was effectively encrypting all of that data we'd housed safely for many years,” comments Varghese.

“When we heard about IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration, we immediately recognized that it was the optimal way to transfer our historical data—not only because of its secure, encrypted method of storing the data, but also because it was a very reasonably priced offering. Once we received the IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration device, we simply connected it, transferred our data and then shipped it back to IBM®. Within just two days, all our data was ready to access in IBM Cloud Object Storage.”

He adds: “We ordered IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration via the IBM website, and the entire process was seamless—the team even took the time to show us how to log into the IBM Cloud Object Storage portal and retrieve our data. When we do historical data processing for our clients in the future, we will definitely use this process to migrate their data.”

Today, Acrometis uses the IBM Cloud to support the 60 virtual environments that drive its machine-learning offering and to store 50TB of historical data. By embracing an enterprise-class platform with a global data center footprint, the company is ready for international growth.

“In the past, spinning up a new environment for a client or a research and development project could take as long as five working days, but with IBM Cloud bare metal servers, we can typically provision what we need in less than a day—80 percent faster than before,” says Varghese. “The combination of IBM Cloud bare metal servers and IBM Cloud Object Storage has contributed to a 35 percent reduction in our operational spend—helping us keep the cost of our service competitive while protecting our margins.”

By using IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration, Acrometis predicts it will be able to significantly shorten its onboarding journeys for new clients.

“We had such a positive experience with IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration that we plan to use it to help new clients send us the data we need to set up their service,” adds Varghese. “We’re confident that IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration could shorten our client onboarding process significantly.”

Based on the success of its IBM Cloud solutions, Acrometis is now planning ways to enhance its platform. The company is investigating ways to harness GPU resources to accelerate its machine-learning workloads, and to incorporate IBM Watson solutions into its services.

“One of the reasons we chose the IBM Cloud is the access it gives us to IBM’s artificial intelligence portfolio,” concludes Varghese. “Our architects are currently looking for opportunities to use IBM Watson APIs to enhance our offering. With IBM Cloud bare metal servers, IBM Cloud Mass Data Migration and IBM Cloud Object Storage, we have the platform we need to achieve our growth ambitions—and we’re very excited by what the future holds.”

Founded in 2002 and headquartered in Malvern, PA, Acrometis (link resides outside of ibm.com, now Adaptive Processing Solutions), LLC is a leader in automated workers’ compensation claims processing. Acrometis’ expert, rules-based family of claims processing platforms enables organizations to optimize their workflows to drive cost-savings, improve efficiency and drive productivity across the lifecycle of a claim.