Industry Update: Applied Systems

Applied Systems announced a number of new enhancements, products, and services at their annual user group conference in Nashville earlier this month. If you’re an Applied Epic or EZLynx user, you should check out the enhancements for your particular platform.

For those of you that are still using TAM (The Agency Manager), Taylor Rhodes (CEO) addressed the future of TAM in his keynote. He said, “Our ongoing and future research and development investments are focused on two management systems: Applied Epic and EZLynx. We want to do that so you have the right choice based on your agency’s or brokerage’s needs. And we’ll continue to invest at scale in these modern, scalable platforms to make them simpler, more powerful, and secure for you. And while we’re excited about these two management systems, we also know there’s a journey ahead of us to help our clients who are on our older solutions (i.e., TAM, Vision, Doris) get to the right path. We want to partner with them on that, and we’re investing in our daily operations, in our system conversion, in our onboarding and training capabilities to help our clients that need more modernized AMS solutions to do so more easily and more affordably.”

For existing users, this means that TAM, Vision, and DORIS are moving to a maintenance-only development mode.

In a private briefing, Rhodes elaborated, “We are not setting a date yet. What we’re telling everybody is it’s time to have a plan.” An agency will have at least 3 years’ notice when a date is established based on Microsoft eliminating support for legacy software in TAM.

This means you will have plenty of time to decide what you want to do with these increasingly outdated Applied management systems. I encourage you not to wait until the bitter end to make a decision on your next AMS platform. The more time you have, the smoother the transition.