Having carried out many acquisitions and mergers, Sapiens — a global provider of software solutions for the insurance industry — experienced challenges in merging physical infrastructures. The merging of the local data center of each acquired company into the main data center in Israel took a long time and was an expensive, complex and difficult process. Moreover, Sapiens had to investment significant resources in managing and maintaining its data center.
Sapiens recently completed a project that migrated 11 on-premise data centers in the U.S. and in India to the cloud infrastructure of VMware Cloud on AWS. As a result, Sapiens is enjoying a double-digit improvement in economic metrics and in the flexibility of its development environments, increasing the company’s competitiveness.
About Sapiens
Sapiens serves the global insurance industry with customized software solutions in the domains of elementary insurance, life insurance, pensions, reinsurance, and more. The company’s solutions enable insurance companies to improve business processes, to quickly adjust to changes in the industry, and to provide their customers with innovative services.
Sapiens was established in 1982 and has extensive experience in collaborating with international insurance companies. Over the years, its customer base has grown to include 600 insurance companies in 27 states in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Israel, among them a number of Fortune 100 companies.
In 2020, the company’s revenues reached $385 million. Today, the Sapiens workforce numbers approximately 4,000, both in Israel and in 14 offices and R&D centers in the U.S., Canada, England, Poland, Latvia and India.
The Technology
- VMware Cloud on AWS
The Challenge
With each of its many mergers and acquisitions, Sapiens faced the challenge of merging physical infrastructures. Merging the local data center of each acquired company into the main data center in Israel was time-consuming, costly, complicated, and difficult. Furthermore, Sapiens had to invest heavily over the years in the management and maintenance of 11 on-premise data centers, including all their operational load, their ongoing maintenance, and the financial costs involved. This challenge was intensified by the fast growth that continues to characterize Sapiens. Accordingly, the company searched for a solution that would reduce the operational load and allow it to focus on its core businesses.
In addition, during the coronavirus period there was a need to upgrade the servers in the branches at short notice, which caused many problems and delays. This experience taught the company that extreme, unpredictable load is another factor making cloud migration to truly essential.
The Solution
Focusing on about 2,000 servers, across 10 U.S. data centers and one Indian data center, supporting the development activities of over 1,000 developers in both countries.
Migrating many databases and programs from the physical infrastructure to the cloud, with complete transparency and without any change to the developers’ ongoing work. The cloud infrastructure also supported the employees’ transition to work-from-home during 2020 while the offices were closed because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Building a uniform infrastructure for a significant part of Sapiens’ global development activity, answering all needs for processing, storage, and backup of the development environments, by means of thousands of virtual servers.
The project, carried out by Matrix CloudZone, continued even as Sapiens acquired new companies and moved those companies’ servers to VMware Cloud on AWS.
Recently, Sapiens acquired Delphi, an American company, and all Delphi’s servers are now being migrated to VMware Cloud on AWS.
The Results
With VMware Cloud on AWS, the development environments enjoy unprecedented flexibility and can scale resources, integrate competitive technologies, launch new products more speedily, and improve business performance. The new infrastructure, deployed with the help of Matrix CloudZone, supports Sapiens’ accelerated growth — both organic and through mergers and acquisitions.
“We found that the virtual data center is financially the most cost-effective solution, since payment is based on use of the physical server and not per virtual machine,” says Almog Nissim, global system manager at Sapiens. “Today, Sapiens is enjoying comprehensive savings of 20–30% on IT expenses, because we have less need than before for the hardware maintenance activities, electricity, communications, office space, and human resources that data center maintenance involves. A huge challenge that we faced until now whenever we merged the data center of an acquired company with the Sapiens infrastructure, is now gone – as though it never existed. And in the future, Sapiens can quickly integrate the information systems and development environments of additional acquisitions into a uniform infrastructure.”
