SimCorp Dimension is a powerful, business-critical platform, but without deliberate optimization, it can quickly become complex, costly, and inefficient. Many IT teams struggle with performance issues, growing infrastructure costs, and legacy data that no longer delivers real business value.
This article outlines a practical, experience-based approach to optimizing SimCorp Dimension in a way that is structured, business-aligned, and cost-effective. It emphasizes visibility, informed decision-making, and sustainable improvement rather than focusing on isolated technical fixes.
Optimization should never begin with assumptions. The first and most important step is gaining full visibility into your current environment.
Key questions to answer:
- What is the actual usage of databases, application servers, and batch processes?
- Which modules, portfolios, and historical datasets are actively used?
- Where are the real performance bottlenecks (database, application tier, interfaces, or reporting)?
This visibility must be grounded in metrics rather than intuition. Monitoring tools, capacity and growth reports, workload analysis, and historical trend data all play a critical role. Once you understand how your SimCorp Dimension landscape is truly behaving, you can move from passive observation to informed action.
Visibility alone has no value if it does not lead to decisions. The goal is not to generate reports for their own sake, but to use insight to drive concrete optimization steps.
Putting Visibility into Practice
The process should start with the creation of a structured audit report that reviews multiple areas of the SimCorp Dimension environment. This audit typically covers database growth, data retention, batch processing, application server utilization, and end-user activity.
A common challenge emerges during this phase: end users often believe they need everything. Historical results, old portfolios, and legacy configurations are rarely questioned. This is where IT must take an advisory role and support the business with data-driven recommendations.
Based on the audit results, teams can:
- Propose data retention periods aligned with regulatory and business needs
- Identify data that should be archived rather than kept online
- Clearly define data and configurations that can be safely deleted
Keeping all historical data in the production environment inevitably leads to an unnecessary increase in costs. This impact is not limited to production alone. Any environment refreshed or cloned from PROD, such as test, UAT, training, high-availability setups, or disaster recovery environments, inherits the same data volume.
As a result, every additional terabyte stored in production is effectively multiplied by the number of lower environments and resilience solutions. This drives higher infrastructure costs, longer refresh times, extended batch windows, and increased operational risk.
True visibility allows IT teams to clearly demonstrate this cost multiplication effect and turn optimization discussions from opinion-based debates into fact-based decisions.
Ask the Business “Why?”
Challenge Legacy Data and Processes
One of the most common reasons for unnecessary complexity and cost in SimCorp Dimension environments is historical data that nobody truly needs anymore.
IT teams should actively engage the business and ask simple, direct questions:
- Why do we keep results from 10, 15, or even 20 years ago?
- Are these portfolios still required for regulatory, audit, or operational reasons?
- How often are old results actually accessed?
In many cases, data is kept “just in case,” without a clear business justification. This leads to larger databases, longer batch windows, slower queries, and higher infrastructure costs. While this hesitation is understandable, it often prevents teams from reassessing whether retained data still delivers measurable business or regulatory value.
Optimization is not about deleting data blindly. It is about aligning data retention with real business value. Archiving, summarizing, or removing obsolete data can significantly improve performance while reducing risk and cost.
Optimization does not mean adding more hardware or endlessly tuning symptoms. It means working smart, systematically, and with intent.
In many SimCorp Dimension environments, performance or capacity issues are addressed by simply adding more resources. While this may provide short-term relief, it rarely solves the root cause and often increases long-term complexity and cost.
Optimize Safely and Save Money
A key concern for many organizations is risk. Optimization must be safe, controlled, and reversible.
Best practices include:
- Implementing changes incrementally
- Validating improvements with measurable KPIs
- Closely involving business stakeholders
- Documenting decisions and outcomes
When done correctly, optimization leads directly to cost savings:
- Lower infrastructure and licensing costs
- Reduced operational effort
- Shorter batch windows and better user experience
Most importantly, these savings are achieved without compromising stability or compliance.
Conclusion
Optimizing SimCorp Dimension is not a one-time technical exercise. It is an ongoing process that starts with visibility, challenges long-standing assumptions, and focuses on smart, business-driven decisions.
By asking “why,” working smart instead of hard, and acting on real data, IT teams can significantly improve performance, reduce costs, and ensure that SimCorp Dimension continues to support the business effectively both now and in the future.
Want to Discuss Your SimCorp Dimension Setup?
If you are looking for practical, experience-based guidance on optimizing SimCorp Dimension our team is available to help.
Get in touch to discuss your environment, validate optimization ideas, and identify clear next steps.
Kadri Elwan
Aleksander Goldschneider
Aslak Aarset Talleraas
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Learn from our experience and insights gained while optimizing financial systems for clients across the financial services industry.
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