Reducing batch-processing time by 48% using Amazon EC2 with Infor

CBS helps consolidate billing across a wide range of services, providing a unified pricing strategy and streamlined customer experience. However, the legacy Microsoft-based system could not meet the intended performance at scale. At the end of every month, banks using Infor’s CBS needed to batch-process hundreds of millions of transactions, which was a time-consuming process.

The legacy infrastructure also limited Infor’s ability to innovate quickly. Additionally, maintaining the infrastructure incurred high operational costs—especially for hardware refresh cycles, disaster recovery setup, and software licensing. Infor looked to AWS for a more scalable, flexible, and cost-effective solution.

Infor took a lift-and-shift approach to migrating CBS to AWS. The company used Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—which provides secure and resizable compute capacity for virtually any workload—to host its Windows Server and SQL Server workloads without making significant changes to the application code. Infor also adopted Amazon CloudWatch, a service that gives visibility into system-wide performance, to monitor and rightsize its application stack.

“We chose to use Amazon EC2 for our instances on virtual machines, which was the simplest solution,” says Brad Schauf, cloud architect at Infor.

The results of the performance optimization of CBS on AWS exceeded Infor’s expectations. While Infor’s original goal was to reduce batch-processing time by 33 percent, the company achieved a 48 percent reduction. Infor also reduced licensing costs by 74 percent by downgrading from SQL Server Enterprise to Standard. These improvements led to a 24 percent reduction in the total cost of ownership.

With a more agile and scalable infrastructure for the CBS, Infor can now focus on delivering value to its customers through the rapid development and deployment of new features and enhancements. The company plans to continue optimizing its AWS architecture, exploring more opportunities to use cloud services and further improve performance and cost-efficiency.

“The data graphs and corresponding advice from AWS gave us the sense that we could really make an impact by fine-tuning our batch and SQL systems,” says Bill Draper, senior systems administrator at Infor. “Overall, we were left with a feeling of empowerment. It was quite gratifying.” Learn more about Infor’s migration journey in its re:Invent 2024 presentation.