Case Study: Municipality of Groningen achieves 25× faster application response times (50s → 2s) with Oracle Engineered Systems (Oracle)

Municipality of Groningen Reduces Application Response Times from 50 Seconds to 2 Seconds Using Engineered Systems

The Municipality of Groningen, a major Dutch city with a large student population and more than 800 municipal applications, faced aging, disparate hardware that caused slow response times, long processing windows for tax and topographical systems, and heavy administration overhead. The IT team needed a scalable, single-vendor solution to speed up citizen-facing services, meet tight deadlines for topographical records, and reduce ongoing maintenance effort.

Working with partner VX Company, Groningen deployed Oracle Engineered Systems (Oracle Exadata X5-2 and Oracle Database Appliance X5-2), consolidating 22 AIX partitions into a compact, standardized platform. Results included a tax application response time cut from ~50 seconds to under 2 seconds and annual tax processing reduced from over 2 days to under 2 hours; topographical map check-ins fell from 4 hours to 90 seconds. The upgrade saved 300+ hours per year on patching, supports 14 TB and 5,000+ users, eliminated prior integration issues, and delivered a faster, more scalable foundation for municipal services.

Municipality of Groningen

Guus van de Sande

Senior Database Engineer