Davinci Speeds Performance, Enables Innovation by Moving to AWS

Davinci provides loan and mortgage software as well as IT consultancy services to large financial institutions across the Netherlands and Belgium. Hundreds of thousands of people across the region use Davinci software to help process their loans and mortgages.

The company has grown quickly. “We had 80 employees a few years ago, and now we have more than 200,” says Jan-Lamber Voortman, managing director at Davinci. As Davinci’s business has expanded, an increasing number of its customers have demanded the company offer cloud-based services. “We were already exploring the cloud, but our customers’ demand accelerated that process,” Voortman says.

Davinci chose to migrate its Microsoft SQL Server–based financial applications from an on-premises data center to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. “Many of our customers were already on AWS, and we knew AWS was the leading cloud technology provider,” Voortman says.

After migrating several of its applications to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for Windows Server instances, Davinci experienced some of the benefits of the cloud. “We got more control over our IT environment, and we had the scalability to quickly create new development and test environments,” says Peter Kobes, architect at Davinci. Following this migration, Davinci decided to move several applications to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server to gain experience. Voortman adds, “We ultimately want to be a cloud-native company, so we knew we had to take the next step.”

Once Davinci had experienced the initial advantages of running Windows workloads on AWS, the company chose to skip its original planned step and move directly to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL to fully benefit from all the features of the cloud-native database—both functional and financial. “During the proof of concept, we received excellent technical support from AWS, which gave us the confidence to use Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL for our SQL Server workloads,” Kobes says. Davinci now manages more than 250,000 loans and over €40 billion (US $44.7 million) in assets with its Close software suite on the AWS Cloud.

Since moving to AWS, Davinci has experienced strong performance benefits. “Once we moved our SQL Server applications to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, we saw a significant performance increase without needing to do any optimization,” says Kobes. “As a result, the application performs better for our loan and mortgage customers every day.”

Davinci can deploy new application environments faster by using AWS to support its SQL Server workloads. “Instead of spending a lot of time on provisioning, now we just click to get a new development environment,” Kobes says. The company can also help its customers implement its applications faster than before. He says, “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.”

Using AWS, Davinci is helping financial institutions achieve compliance with stringent regulatory requirements. “Our banking customers have to comply with regional and national regulations, so we provide compliant Close software and audit trails in place to support that, which we can provide on AWS,” says Voortman.

Davinci is also continuing to explore the use of additional AWS services to support new applications and services in the future. Voortman concludes, “As our company name suggests, ‘‘we are committed to being innovative. We can fully support faster innovation by running on AWS.”