The growing company has an ever-increasing database and hardware requirement, and it needs a solution that can scale with it while keeping it license-compliant and keeping its data secure.
License-inclusive Oracle Database@Azure fixes the risks associated with scalability while providing BV Liantis with low latency and security.
BV Liantis expects to have financial clarity around licensing costs and spend less time on infrastructure requirements and more time on its core business.
With hundreds of thousands of Belgian families relying on BV Liantis to ensure they get paid each month, it’s critical that the organization’s salary calculation engine is always running smoothly.
BV Liantis is a one-stop shop for all things human resources, supporting businesses from independent freelancers to large hospital systems. Its goal is to handle all the HR tasks so its customers can focus on their core businesses. And making sure employees get paid is a big task with big impact.
The Liantis salary calculation engine, which runs on Oracle, took about 300 man years to build and has 100 software developers working on it full time. In other words, it’s incredibly complex—and that translates to a lot of disk space and ever-increasing CPU requirements.
“If our customers rely this heavily on our services to run their business, it’s really important that when the time comes to pay salaries that our software is always available, runs quickly with no hiccups, can scale if the system is growing, and is legally compliant,” says CTO John Helsmoortel.
Helsmoortel says Liantis reviews its infrastructure each day, with a full evaluation every four years—that’s usually when the existing hardware, which has all been housed in an on-premises environment, starts to become too slow.
Because calculating salaries is the most resource-intensive work Liantis does, the organization’s hardware runs at full power about 10 days out of the month (before payday) but is relatively idle for the other 20 days, Helsmoortel says. With a workload that’s shifting between busy and idle, it was natural for Liantis to consider cloud solutions.
As Liantis was evaluating its infrastructure requirements, Microsoft and Oracle announced Oracle Database@Azure. This solution offers Oracle database services on OCI infrastrucuture located inside Azure datacenters, giving customers flexibility in where they run their workloads. The timing of that announcement was perfect for Liantis, which was already an Azure customer, as their application platform is based on Azure Kubernetes Service.
Helsmoortel explains that Liantis had considered a different cloud solution for its Oracle database four years ago but decided against it at the time because it would have meant going multicloud, which would have added too much complexity for support. The organization appreciates the simplicity of a single-cloud approach and expects that it will explore additional Azure offerings such as AI in the future, he says.
Migrating to Oracle Database@Azure means Liantis can natively consume Oracle services on Azure and scale up as the organization grows without worrying about obtaining additional licenses or needing to account for power outages or restrictions, which are common in Europe. Liantis will also have access to additional features such as Oracle RAC, which will allow the company to limit downtime during maintenance.
Helsmoortel says low latency was also an important feature because Liantis deals in many small transactions and any delay can really add up. Additional security features such as encryption at rest were another selling point.
If our customers rely this heavily on our services to run their business, it’s really important that when the time comes to pay salaries that our software is always available, runs quickly with no hiccups, can scale if the system is growing, and is legally compliant.
John Helsmoortel, CTO, BV Liantis
Liantis is currently migrating out of its physical datacenter and onto Oracle Database@Azure. Helsmoortel is particularly looking forward to having the additional financial clarity that will come with this transition.
In an on-premises environment, there is a hardware acquisition cost every four years, plus the cost of licenses; both of these can be difficult to predict with certainty. With this new cloud approach, Helsmoortel can know exactly what his costs will be, helping his organization make better decisions and passing on that clarity to business stakeholders.
Helsmoortel encourages other organizations that are considering a cloud solution to make sure they are comparing apples to apples. He says businesses often perceive cloud solutions as more expensive than on-premises, but they forget to consider the work they’re putting into their existing solution, as well as the unpredictability of costs.
Helsmoortel hopes that this transition will allow Liantis to shift its focus.
“Now our focus is still very often on the infrastructure side and the complexity of tying things together,” he says. “By moving to one cloud solution, that should change, and we should be able to find more time to work for our business.”
In this way, Oracle Database@Azure is doing for Liantis what Liantis is doing for companies all across Belgium: paving the way for the business to focus on doing business.
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