Decisiv Delivers Continuous Availability, Doubles Productivity by Moving to AWS

Thousands of trucking companies across the United States depend on the Decisiv service relationship management (SRM) platform to pick up and deliver packages on time. The platform, which connects manufacturers to dealers and commercial trucking fleets, is used by 40,000 people at 4,500 service locations and fleets every day.

For Decisiv, ensuring that the platform is always available for users is critical. “Every minute the platform is down represents lost revenue to fleet owners and lost business to their own customers,” says Satish Joshi, chief technology officer for Decisiv. The company also needed the ability to scale the platform, which was difficult because the environment was hosted in a collocated data center. “We needed to grow our business more easily, and we also wanted agility for our development team to create new software and get it to customers faster,” says Joshi.

Decisiv decided to move its Microsoft SQL Server–based SRM environment to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud to overcome its business challenges. Joshi says, “We wanted to modernize our architecture, and we liked the availability and scalability of AWS. In addition, the breadth of services and speed of innovation enabled by AWS helps us create new software faster.”

The company initially migrated its SQL Server environment to Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for SQL Server. More recently, Decisiv moved the SRM platform to Amazon Aurora, fully managed by Amazon RDS. “We wanted to move away from SQL Server to find better performance and scalability and lower costs, and Amazon Aurora was the perfect fit,” says Joshi.

Using AWS, Decisiv built a cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) version of the SRM solution. The company then introduced Insite 2.0, a visualization platform based on Amazon Redshift that uses business intelligence technologies to enable better visualization and reporting for commercial fleet operators.

Decisiv can ensure high availability for its SRM platform by running on the AWS Cloud. “We went from 98 percent to well over 99 percent uptime by taking advantage of the reliable AWS architecture and multiple Availability Zones per AWS Region,” says Joshi. “This helps our commercial fleet customers access shipping information at all times. And the effort to maintain that uptime has been reduced, because we only need to focus on application availability, not infrastructure availability. AWS takes care of that for us.”

The company has increased its development velocity by moving to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL. “We can move much faster using Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL,” says Joshi. “Our development productivity has doubled, so our developers can spend more time creating SRM platform enhancements and roll out new features more often. These capabilities are helping us stay competitive.” Decisiv can also provision new development environments in days, compared to weeks before, because of the agility of AWS. The company is currently moving to a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) pipeline on AWS, which will result in code deployments in hours instead of days.

The organization has also expanded the SRM solution to more easily accommodate a growing volume of new customers. “When we migrated our SQL Server environment to Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL, we also consolidated multiple databases into a single Aurora instance,” says Joshi. “This helps us add more customers quickly without changing anything in the underlying architecture.”

In addition, Decisiv has improved its security posture since moving to AWS, so it can comply with regulations such as NIST-800. “As we move forward with new solutions for our enterprise customers, we have realized their IT departments are demanding better security and compliance capabilities,” Joshi says. “AWS, as well as our own application security, helps us meet those requirements in a way we could not do with an on-premises infrastructure.”

Running SRM on AWS, Decisiv now has a better ability to innovate. “Our industry is typically very slow to adopt modern technologies,” says Joshi. “By running our platform on AWS, we are showing our customers what is possible in the cloud.”