I like counting things, says Chris Garson, who heads up all IT that affects Progressives independent agents, and in the course of conversation over the next hour, he proved it.

For example: We have a goal of 99.9 percent availability for our critical, outfacing systems that agents touch. Twenty-six of our 40 primary production systems are included in that goal. That allows me only 526 minutes of downtime for the entire year, including scheduled maintenance. Thats only eight and a half hours for the entire year. How can that be achieved? So far this year, those systems have been up 99.7 percent of the time. Weve had 134 documented outages, and 104 of them had zero customer impact because our built-in redundancy worked properly and the systems never went down.

Garson has a lot to count. Progressive is the countrys largest writer of auto insurance through 30,000 independent agencies. It writes more than $9 billion per year of premium, about 70 percent of which is written by those agencies. Most of that is private passenger auto insurance. Progressive also writes small commercial fleets of 40 or fewer vehicles, and it has a specialty division that writes specialty lines, such as motorcycles, ATVs, boats, RVs, or such things as the new Segway human transporters. If its written by independent agents, Garson is responsible for it.