Ellie Mae Inc., one of the largest mortgage application processing companies in the U.S., handles about 35% of mortgage applications across America. The company‘s technology solutions enable lenders to originate more loans, lower origination cost and reduce the time to close, ensuring the highest degree of compliance quality and efficiency, according to Sachin Dhoot (pictured), vice president of data and platform engineering at Ellie Mae.

“I’m very proud to say that Ellie Mae’s stack — all of the data solutions, and in fact, all of our other products — they are able to scale, and they have been able to scale to the record volume this year,” Dhoot said. “All because of how we have designed it using the AWS technology stack. We have … a very rich roadmap coming up.”

Dhoot spoke with Rebecca Knight, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent. They talked about Ellie Mae’s data modernization journey, as well as the new ways the company is monetizing its data. (* Disclosure below.)

Building a new cloud-based data platform to monetize data

Ellie Mae currently stores the data of nearly 50% of all U.S. mortgages, according to Dhoot. It’s an incredibly huge amount of data that was prime for data monetization, and organizations were asking for access to their data, Dhoot pointed out. This request set Ellie Mae on an automation journey through data stack modernization.

“We had such a rich industry data set [and were] very interested in using that data to get actionable insights about the industry, about their competitive advantages, and develop some innovative services on top of it. So those were the challenges which we were trying to solve,” Dhoot said.

Ellie Mae’s original architecture included its own private data center, and each customer had their own database to work with. And while the product was successful, when it came to data, the customer experience was lacking, which led to the company on its own cloud journey.

Because Ellie Mae’s data volume was at such a high level, it choose Amazon Web Services Inc. cloud solutions, along with Persistent Systems Ltd., which delivers digital business acceleration, enterprise modernization and next-generation product engineering.

“We needed a big data lake for this, storage compute separation, [and] we also needed ability to seamlessly import data from any applications internal or external,” Dhoot said. “And AWS absolutely gave us all of this. So AWS along with Persistent technologies actually helped us with this evaluation and the development of the data platform.”

This new data platform was able to meet customer’s needs, and they can now replicate their data, access reports and run analytical queries directly on the data warehouse in the cloud.

Ellie Mae was also able to monetize their data by making an application called Ellie Mae Insights, which gives lenders the ability to compare themselves with their peers in the industry.

“They can actually benchmark themselves and decide whether they are doing great, not great, what do they have to change?” Dhoot stated. “And this is all in near real time — so this is not like a month-old data and all that. So that’s the beauty of this product.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: Persistent Systems Ltd. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Persistent Systems nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE