Why Davinci migrated and modernized their Microsoft SQL Server workloads onto AWS

Change can be hard. However, customers frequently tell me they find the greatest success modernizing their infrastructure when they embrace larger, transformative efforts, rather than small, incremental changes. Even though modernizing promises improved productivity and innovation, many customers aren’t sure how to start. In this blog I’ll walk through how Davinci accelerated their modernization efforts with AWS to increase innovation while lowering costs for their customers.

Davinci, an international software development and IT consultancy, faced similar dilemmas as it sought to modernize to meet customer requirements in the face of increased competition. Peter Kobes, an architect at Davinci, describes this issue by saying: “On-premises IT doesn’t [align with] the increasing demand for financial institutions [to] quickly introduce new financial products, given that it is too costly and rigid to cope with demands.”

While the company already moved many Windows workloads to AWS, Davinci still needed to determine how best to modernize their on-premises Microsoft SQL Server-based applications. Davinci wanted “database freedom,” declares Jan-Lamber Voortman, managing director at Davinci: “For us, Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL on Linux mean[t] database freedom, [a] rich set of features, flexibility, and scalability.”

But how to get there?

Davinci fully committed to their migration process, instead of opting for an incremental approach. Having started by running Microsoft Windows workloads on AWS, Davinci trusted AWS and went cloud-native, replacing Microsoft SQL Server with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL.

Davinci’s Migration (and Modernization!) Story

Davinci delivers loan and mortgage software services to large financial institutions across the Netherlands and Belgium. As the company’s customer base grew, their customers demanded increased functionality and flexibility, demands that were proving impossible to achieve with on-premises infrastructure. Davinci’s customers asked for more cloud-based services like automated document processing and analysis in loan and mortgage origination. Davinci’s customers wanted key benefits enabled by the cloud like: no software licensing and infrastructural obligations to pass along to clients, lower costs, improved scalability (among other performance benefits), and pay-for-use pricing.

Davinci evaluated multiple cloud providers, but decided that AWS has obvious advantages over others, making AWS the best fit for DaVinci. First, says Voortman, “Many of our customers were already on AWS, and we knew AWS was the leading cloud technology provider,” citing AWS’ leadership in depth and breadth of services, a long history of strong operational performance and security, and compliance with financial services standards. Moreover, Kobes’ notes, “AWS [is] closer to our way of doing things (innovative, progressing fast, transparent, etc.).” Nor is that leadership confined to cloud services, Kobes says, highlighting AWS’ lower cost, excellent support, and customer-driven development: “We can talk to the people in charge of evolving existing services and creating new ones and contribute with ideas or expressing needs, and in a relatively short time they become available.”

For these reasons, AWS was the clear choice for Davinci. But, they still needed to figure out how to migrate workloads.

Beginning on the Road to Modernization

Wary of rushing too fast into their cloud native future, Davinci decided to move several of their Microsoft Windows-based workloads from an on-premises datacenter onto Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Windows Server instances.

The benefits of AWS in these initial days were significant. “We got more control over our IT environment, and we had the scalability to quickly create new development and test environments,” notes Kobes. This made it much easier for Davinci to roll out its first cloud product, DocStreet, which significantly improved Davinci’s mortgage application and approval process by automating the acceptance of supporting documentation like pay slips and identification documents.

By moving these workloads to AWS, Davinci achieved new levels of agility:

The way we could scale/auto-scale the resources and script the IT infrastructure via CloudFormation scripts opened new horizons for us. We started to do things that before we’d been hesitant to do because of the complexity involved in creating new environments or setting up scenarios for performance testing, disaster recovery, or just a new proof of concept….[And] instead of spending a lot of time on provisioning, now we just click to get a new development environment. Because of the agility of AWS, we deployed one of our applications for a customer in days instead of the months it would normally take.

Emboldened by their success, Davinci wanted to take the next step toward entirely cloud-native status by moving Microsoft SQL Server-based financial applications to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Microsoft SQL Server.

However, the company’s trust in AWS made it possible to skip this step entirely, and they moved straight to a fully-managed cloud model. As Kobes says: “During the proof of concept, we received excellent technical support from AWS, which gave us the confidence to use Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL for our Microsoft SQL Server workloads.”

Realizing the transformational benefits of AWS

Davinci didn’t simply migrate workloads to AWS, but instead transformed their business through their AWS migration journey. Today, Davinci manages more than 250,000 loans and over €40 billion (US $44.7 billion) in assets with its Close software suite on the AWS Cloud. The company has seen a “significant increase” in application performance, Kobes details, “without needing to do any optimization.”

How so? With AWS, Kobes continues, we get “very easy deployment of new clusters – it takes minutes instead of hours, with fully automated backups requiring only minimal administration effort.” One benefit of this is that Davinci now has fewer concurrency issues with Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL than it had running Microsoft SQL Server. All in all, AWS “gave us features which we could exploit to make our services better and faster,” says Kobes.

Voortman adds that switching from Microsoft SQL Server to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL gives Davinci “database freedom, [a] rich set of features, flexibility, and scalability. We think it’s made for financial services and it helps us to stay ahead of competitors.” Importantly, this “database freedom” came at a significantly lower cost than Davinci had paid for Microsoft SQL Server.

Lower cost and increased innovation: these are some of the primary benefits Davinci and others have experienced through transformational adoption of AWS.

Looking Forward

Next week, we will highlight another company in its modernization journey onto AWS. I hope you’ll join me as we release these regular blog posts of customers who have chosen to modernize on AWS. As you do, I hope you’ll also ask the question, “What’s your plan for moving off Windows Server?” Or off Oracle? Or whatever old-guard technology keeps you from modernizing to better care for your customers?

Let AWS help you assess how your company can get the most out of cloud. Join all the AWS customers that trust us to run their most important applications in the best cloud. To have us create an assessment for your Windows applications or all your applications, email us at WhatsYourModernizationPlan@amazon.com and please consider joining the conversation using the #WhatsYourModernizationPlan hashtag.

To learn more on modernizing Windows Server or SQL Server, visit Windows on AWS.