Success Stories

AWS Partner Story: Idexcel Manages and Maintains Cync Software's flagship product "Cync Application Suite" on Amazon Web Services Infrastructure

About Cync Software

NDS Systems, based in Tampa, Florida, understands that the software market is in a constant state of flux. These ever-changing market conditions present a unique set of challenges for any software provider. NDS Systems’ offerings include NDS ERP and Cync Software.

Innovating in the Commercial Lending Market

NDS Systems has a vision to automate the exchange of information between borrowers and lenders in the commercial lending market, an industry that is complex and highly controlled.

"Our flagship product, Cync Application Suite, provides a diverse collection of financing-software solutions that cover a vast range of asset-based lending, accounts-receivable financing, factoring, and related credit services,” explains Jennifer Ballard, director of client services for Cync Software. “By streamlining, standardizing, and automating the collection and analysis of borrowers’ financial information, the Cync Application Suite provides a complete solution for industry organizations—from commercial finance companies and national and regional banks to A/R financing companies—to track and monitor all aspects of their commercial lending portfolio."

She continues, "Cync has focused its efforts on increasing productivity, reducing labor costs and mitigating risk. Asset Based Lending is very complex and requires a lot of manpower to monitor and manage the risks associated with these loans. In a recent client survey, Cync users have reported up to 75% increased productivity, 35% reduction in labor costs and 100% reported that Cync assists them in making better credit decisions for their companies and clients alike."

Why AWS

When NDS Systems first started developing the Cync Software application, they hosted it themselves. One of the challenges of being new to the industry is managing costs so that the company can continue to add features and eventually become a core banking application that everyone uses.

"Some of our competitors are in the cloud, but most of them stick with the private cloud and have all of the costs and responsibilities associated with that,” says Ballard. “We think AWS is a smarter choice because of its high availability, scalability, reliability, and security compliance."

Scalability is particularly helpful for Cync Software’s growth. "I don't have to know how big a customer's data is going to get or how many file uploads they're going to have in a day," says Ballard. "With AWS, there are no limits. That was huge for us because continuously monitoring that—to know what volume to expect—is really challenging."

Ballard knew from the beginning that they would need a partner to help with the move. "Our core competency is selling and supporting Cync Software; we needed a technology partner familiar with AWS implementations to help us." The company turned to long-time APN partner Idexcel in the early stages of product development.

Scalable, Available and Reliable—All in the Cloud

Idexcel began working with Cync Software in 2011. "The start of the relationship was just moving the infrastructure into AWS," says Jed Tonelson, director cloud sales for Idexcel. "We understood that their product, as a SaaS application, had to maintain data security and data integrity in addition to being highly scalable and available."

Cync Software is a highly scalable and highly available web application running in the AWS Cloud. It uses AWS Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) to secure incoming traffic, with web and app servers hosted behind internal elastic load balancers (ELBs) in private subnets. Internal ELBs distribute traffic to the app servers and autoscale the server on demand. The application uses Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for private data storage, while static files are stored in private Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) buckets and published using Amazon CloudFront.

Cync Software IT architecture

In addition, some features use microservices, such as Amazon's API Gateway, Lambda, and EC2 Container Service (ECS). To improve performance, the system uses Amazon ElastiCache, while AWS CloudTrail maintains application and infrastructure logs, and Amazon CloudWatch and Elasticsearch Service (Amazon ES) provide monitoring and alerts.

Ballard and her team are working hard to round out the Cync Software offerings by adding functionality that provides more of what lenders need. "Our software is new to the market, so we don’t yet have all the features and functionality that our competitors do," says Ballard. “Using AWS and partnering with Idexcel lets us focus on the features that we want to add—credit services, financial spreading, and additional reporting."

The AWS Partner Network Advantage

"Idexcel has been achieving excellence by delivering high-quality custom application development services, innovative testing solutions, and competitively priced IT staffing services to clients for nearly two decades," explains Tonelson.

The company's AWS experience and certification as an APN Partner made them a great choice for the Cync Software's migration to the cloud. "Of course, we really wanted to find someone who already had AWS experience, but we also wanted a development house to help us continue adding features."

The Idexcel team worked to improve and modernize the application as they set it up in AWS. Ballard notes, "As development progressed, we engaged in some different projects to see how well we could work together in that respect. We added a person on-site from their organization and went from there."

Now Cync has a dedicated Idexcel team. “We had several software developers in our Tampa location, but when we entered into a partnership with Idexcel, it gave us access to a large offshore development team that not only provides additional development but 24 hour support for our clients as well,” explains Ballard. "I get work done during U.S. hours with our staff and while we're sleeping, their India office is working on deployments, changes to the application, security suggestions, and other major tasks. Because of this partnership, Cync can now provide round-the-clock support and it’s a win-win for everybody." (Know more about our AWS Partner Story)

About Idexcel

For more information about how Idexcel can help your company build and manage your AWS environment, see Idexcels' listing in the AWS Partner Directory.