Magaya Modernizes & Transforms with Tessell, Achieving ROI Goals

Company Overview

Magaya Corporation is a privately held logistics and supply-chain software provider founded in 2001. Its original application, known internally as Classic, was a monolithic, thick-client system that performed well on-premises but was never intended to harness cloud elasticity or a multi-tenant architecture. In 2023, Magaya was acquired by a private equity (PE) firm, re-capitalized, and given aggressive ROI targets. Consequently, in order to achieve new business milestones, Magaya’s mission became clear: move away from the legacy monolith and fully adopt the company’s next-generation, multi-tenant platform—dubbed Blue Ivory—which was necessary to scale the business and meet investor profitability mandates.

Situation

Shortly after the recapitalization, Niten joined Magaya with a clear directive: accelerate the adoption of the next-generation Blue Ivory platform.  The PE Firm’s digital playbook starts with the migration of all workloads to Amazon Web Services (AWS).  

The re-capitalization provided capital to transform the business with a fixed runway to reach this milestone. This meant that Magaya’s customers on the Classic application needed to be migrated to the Blue Ivory platform in order to become cash-flow positive well before the PE’s capital infusion was exhausted.

Although Blue Ivory was built to scale elastically in the cloud, the application’s early performance did not meet or exceed the bespoke, legacy Classic system. The engineering team traced the issue in part to Blue Ivory’s database structure. The team had moved from a proprietary database (used in Classic) to PostgreSQL, but with minimal tuning and limited in-house PostgreSQL expertise. Additionally, the new design required replicating the old database’s pessimistic-locking behavior by building a custom Reservation Service.  With an expanded microservice architecture the pessimistic locking led to even further complexity and performance overhead.

Challenges

1. Technical Roadblocks

• Under-Optimized PostgreSQL: Blue Ivory’s Postgres environment lacked proper tuning and best practices for high-volume queries. Memory settings, physical data-disk layouts, and partitioning were not configured to handle tens of thousands of rows being fetched and updated thousands of times per second.
• Custom Locking Logic: The Reservation Service re-created pessimistic locking in Postgres—an unusual approach given that modern databases prefer optimistic locking.  The thick-client, client-service software architecture mitigated the pessimistic lock contention, however, the modern multi-tenant architecture created a workload variability that was difficult to size appropriately across environments.

2. Operational & Business Risk

• Single Point of Failure: An outage for any of Magaya’s logistics and supply-chain customers would result in an immediate halt to their business operations.  Inventory management, product shipping, delivery scheduling, and tracking would no longer be possible while the application was down.   The legacy client-server database data layer was architected to read and write on flat files.  Consequently, no modern change-data-capture replication technology could support transactionally ACID high availability.
• Concentrated Operational Knowledge: A single consultant possessed all the specialized PostgreSQL knowledge, exposing Magaya to risk if that resource became unavailable.  Blue Ivory was entirely backed by PostgreSQL and represented the future data foundation of the company.
• Performance Gap with Classic: Customers who initially tried Blue Ivory encountered slower performance in comparison to the legacy application. Complaints piled up, threatening the migration targets.
• Multi-Tenancy vs. Single-Tenancy: Classic was single-tenant, but the PE firm’s financial objectives could only be achieved with the cost benefits of both a multi-tenant and elastic scale-out architecture.  A simple “lift-and-shift” of the monolithic Classic design into the cloud would be economically unsustainable.

Solution

1. Engaging Tessell for Managed PostgreSQL

Niten reached out to Tessell, a multi-cloud database-as-a-service (DBaaS) PostgreSQL platform provider as he searched for technology that could both solve these problems and scale with Magaya’s business. Tessell offered the flexibility to run custom software (i.e., the Reservation Service) on the database nodes while delivering deep expertise in Postgres day-to-day lifecycle management, ongoing performance management, and tuning.

2. Proof of Concept (PoC)

• Initial Proof of Concept Results: The proof-of-concept achieved a 10× performance improvement over Magaya’s in-house QTS data center.  Astounded by numbers, Magaya’s success criteria were exceeded in every objective.
• AWS Migration: Encouraged by these results, Magaya moved forward with Tessell on AWS. Tessell’s team fine-tuned PostgreSQL at every layer: partitioning strategies, memory buffers, and disk I/O configurations—transforming Blue Ivory’s database performance.

3. Addressing Key Risks

• High Availability & Multi-AZ: Tessell’s multi-Availability Zone setup provided synchronous replication across physically separate data centers, drastically improving disaster recovery and uptime.
• Eliminating the Single DBA Constraint: By leveraging Tessell’s support engineers and 24×7 coverage, Magaya no longer relied on a single consultant for critical database operations.
• Preserving Margins: A truly elastic, multi-tenant solution let Magaya scale up or down on-demand and align database costs more closely with actual workload—key to meeting the PE’s ROI requirements.

Results

1. 10× Performance Boost. Blue Ivory’s critical queries—often returning tens of thousands of rows multiple times per second—saw a tenfold improvement when running on Tessell-tuned PostgreSQL. This closed the performance gap with the older Classic system and removed the principal blocker to migration.  The improved performance enabled Magaya to achieve its throughput and latency objectives with the transactional consistency business requirements of pessimistic locking.
2. Accelerated Customer Onboarding. With performance no longer a bottleneck, new Blue Ivory customers have not reported database-related complaints.  
3. Business Optimization through Deployment Flexibility. With Blue Ivory, Magaya now supports both multi-tenant deployments, in addition to, dedicated single-tenant deployments.  Consequently, Magaya can both cost-optimize small customers without isolation requirements, as well as support larger customers—like major freight forwarders—that require continuous high transaction throughput.‍
4. Reduced Business & Operational Risk ‍
   • No Single Point of Failure: Tessell replaced the single DBA model with a team of PostgreSQL experts. Tessell’s self-service and ‍
   • Multi-AZ Reliability: Thanks to built-in synchronous replication, Magaya now meets the highest uptime standards for application availability and disaster recovery. Additionally, disaster recovery takes place regularly with one-click-failover.‍
5. Path to ROI. By fulfilling the private equity mandate to move to a scalable, multi-tenant solution, Magaya is delivering the cost efficiencies and revenue growth needed to become cash-flow positive on schedule. Blue Ivory is now positioned as the transformational growth engine of Magaya’s long-term vision.

This transformation story underscores how a strategic partnership with Tessell helped Magaya overcome crucial performance, operational, and business hurdles—enabling them to confidently migrate customers from the legacy Classic system to the modern, cloud-based Blue Ivory platform.