Abrigo - Sageworks replaces F5-BIG IP with Kemp LoadMaster

Abrigo - Sageworks Enhances SaaS Application Speed and Responsiveness with Kemp LoadMaster

Sageworks data and applications are used by thousands of banks, credit unions and accounting firms across North America and internationally. Through these applications, it created the largest real-time database of private-company financial statement information in the United States. Banker’s Toolbox acquired Sageworks in 2018, and together they are now Abrigo. The company’s compliance, credit risk, and lending solutions to allows financial institutions to manage risk and drive growth. Abrigo helps financial institutions succeed in the face of ever-changing and increasing regulatory requirements, limited resources, increasing competition, evolving technologies, and changing customer expectations

The Responsiveness Challenge

Heavily relied on by major financial industry organizations, including one-fifth of the nation’s banks, the Abrigo - Sageworks data center serves up results for nearly four million requests a day. To meet the needs of its customers, the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company needs its systems to remain responsive and available, without fail. As such, load balancing technology for their very active on-premises data center is critical.

To serve this need, Abrigo - Sageworks was using F5 BIG IP load balancers. However, the company was experiencing support challenges with F5, and the product’s user interface was complex and difficult to navigate. This drove Abrigo - Sageworks to look for a new solution.

For the complex Abrigo - Sageworks environment, an easy-to-use API is very important as the company is consistently developing new functionally and services. Making a switch to Kemp would save them development time, and Director of Technology, Tom Hearn was convinced it would also improve speed and responsiveness for customers.

The Kemp Solution

Once the decision to move to Kemp for load balancing was made, the implementation was very fast. The original Virtual LoadMaster implementation for the test/dev environment was completed in just 45 minutes. Two additional physical LoadMaster units for the data center’s active/passive clusters were deployed in just three hours.

“Before deployment, we performed a full test internally so that we could replicate how the LoadMasters would perform,” said Hearn. “The ease of implementation was truly impressive. With Kemp we met all of our core criteria including ease-of-use, great product, value pricing and exceptional support.

The End Result

Since deploying the Kemp solutions, Abrigo - Sageworks has seen outstanding performance levels. Customer response rates are less than 5 microseconds and they’ve seen a 24% enhancement in speed and responsiveness. The new solutions have also enabled much greater security and quality of service with features including SNIB certificates and SSL offloading. Another benefit is the system UI which is significantly easier to use and the overall maintenance time, which has proven to be very minimal. In fact, patching time for the new devices can be completed in about 20 minutes for both devices which is six times faster than before.

“With Kemp we’re able to do a lot more from a security perspective than we ever could with F5,” added Hearn. “From user experience improvements to application delivery, quality of services and cost savings, the Kemp solutions have delivered outstanding results. Kemp has made us phenomenally happy.”