Buckeye Insurance Group is a small company with some bigtechnology plans. As an insurer, Buckeye writes $60 million inpremium in eight states, mostly in the Midwest. But Buckeye is morethan an insurer. The group's latest addition is an IT servicescompany, Marias Technology, which will offer its talent andexpertise to other small companies that find themselves in need ofsome technology assistance.

The timing of the Marias startup may give the appearance ofbeing a reaction to the difficult economy, but  it wasstarted to allow IT to expand its capabilities beyond BuckeyeInsurance, according to R. Christopher Haines, vice president,technical operations and CIO. “We got board approval for this inlate 2008,” he says. “At first we did some little stuff here andthere.”

In 2009, Buckeye was sidetracked by one of its own projects,upgrading to Insuresoft's Diamond version 5.

“Insuresoft had rewritten to .NET and we were moving to theprint solution,” says Haines. “We also were moving from ourhomegrown Web portal to the Diamond portal. It was a big year forus, so we didn't look at doing a lot with Marias.”

The name Marias comes from a mountain pass in Montana's GlacierNational Park. When the Great Northern Railroad was looking to getover the Rockies they found this pass, which they used to get overthe Rockies.

“It's a place that's been special to me and my family,” saysHaines. “We wanted to pick [a name] that had meaning so we choseMarias Technology.”

One area Marias is focusing on is working with small insurers toreplace their legacy systems.

“We had some prospects visit and all of them were smallercompanies under $25 million that were financially strong, but theyjust knew that something was coming to an end,” says Haines.“Either a programmer or a lead person on a homegrown system wasnear retirement, or they were not on the Web and couldn't doreal-time processing, or they couldn't let customers make paymentsonline.”

Haines believes companies are beginning to spend more money ontheir technology after holding off as the economy suffered.

“They are deciding that if they are going to survive they aregoing to have to do something,” he says. “If you are a $20 millioncompany with 15-25 employees and very few if any in IT do you gobuy a system that may call for you to have a CIO or do you go tosomeone like Marias where you can gain those efficiencies, pay lessthan what you would pay in salaries, and gain the expertise from usto reach another level.”

One target for Marias is companies operating on legacy systemsor small insurers that have found themselves in over their headswhen trying to modernize.

“These are still viable and profitablecompanies,” he says. “They offer something to their niche. I wouldhate to see all of those types of companies get gobbled up. We wantthese companies to get back to the business of insurance and out ofthe business of insurance technology. There are companies out therethat can't do things like policy download. They need help and thoseare the things [Marias] can do.”

At the beginning of 2010, with its own IT projects stabilized,Buckeye decided to get some momentum going with Marias. The companydoesn't focus strictly on insurers, serving non-insurers aswell.

“We can offer both of them application hosting and Web hosting,”says Haines. “We have a talented developer, but we don't want to doa lot of large-scale Web-development projects. We prefer to dothings within our core competencies.”

Buckeye has always done its own internal server work, points outHaines, and has never outsourced anything.

“We hosted for a few years some smaller insurance companies, butwe thought we'd take it to a larger scale,” he says. “Also, our bigthing is our availability services offerings. We've always pushedto think about disaster recovery programs. On our most recent stateaudit we created a disaster recovery program for Buckeye. We thinkthat's where we can help other companies.”

To create a backup center, Marias has taken over the previousBuckeye headquarters in Piqua, Ohio, and is making a largeinvestment to finish up its availability services lab where PCs andphones are available. Haines estimates Marias could sell between 25and 50 seats.

“We've taken steps to have redundant connections to the Internetfrom different types of providers, but the price is so much cheaperfor newer connections,” says Haines. “We have large fiber-cableconnections and we back it up with a T1 and an Ethernet at the[backup] building.”

Marias is focused mainly on the insurance side of technology andon companies under $200 million in written premium.

“We're interested in the NAMIC-type companies we're familiarwith,” says Haines. “We understand things like how the dayprogresses for an insurance company. A lot of us do the same thingsthat line up. That strengthens our offering to insurancecompanies.”

In addition to the hosting and availability services, Mariasoffers help with implementation services.

“We have a lot of history in moving off a legacy system andmoving to a client/server-based system,” says Haines.

Marias also offers some BPO capabilities forprinting and mail. “We're not doing data entry, but we actuallyhave a couple of quotes out for some printing and mailingbusiness,” says Haines. “One of the companies is double the size ofBuckeye, so that would be a nice customer for us.”

Handling the mailroom may not seem like an IT job—and itisn't—but Haines reports his first management job at Buckeye was tooversee the mailroom.

“In the first week both people quit,” he remembers. “I had papercoming out all over and trying to get stuff out. It taught me a lotand the mailroom [at Buckeye] still reports to IT.”

Marias started slowly, but word has gotten out and Haines claimshe's on the phone talking with potential customers.

“As we find companies that need a system in addition to ourservices, we've been able to recommend them to Insuresoft and inreturn we're out jointly on quotes with [Insuresoft] to provide asubset of services,” he says. “It's only been a few weeks but therehas been a ton of activity. What we've also done is talk to othervendors that don't offer the same services, but with whom we have agood relationship. They are comfortable with us and know some ofthe things Buckeye has been able to accomplish. They are confidentin recommending us to others.”

Haines has not hired any Marias-specific employees, but he feelsthat is a possibility for the future. He compares the process toanother of his own avocations: volunteer firefighting.

“You get prepared for when everything goes to pieces, but noteverything is a fire,” he says. “In our mailroom we have twostate-of-the-art printers, but we're done printing everyday bynoon. We have built-in efficiencies, but if we take on three moreprinting customers we'll buy more [printers]. We have tried to bethorough. For the last few years we have thought through ourbusiness plan. We have thought out if one customer becomes four andthen seven. How are we going to react to that? We're not going toget cute and be everything for everybody. We can provide total IToutsourcing for a company that is like Buckeye or a little biggerif that's what they want to do.”