Impact Awards: Arinco reduces Brighter Super's compute spend by 90%

Arinco took home the Data Modernisation Award at the 2025 techpartner.news Impact Awards 2025 for its overhaul of Brighter Super’s data environment.

Based in Melbourne, Arinco is an artificial intelligence specialist company that also offers modern work, digital applications, and cybersecurity solutions.

Arinco was contacted by Brighter Super, a Queensland based superannuation fund that has 280,000 members and more than $35 billion under management, which was facing escalating cloud costs and slow data procession.

Its data platform was struggling to keep pace with demands leading to performance bottlenecks, prolonged job execution and escalating costs, so Brighter Super contacted Arinco to help build a more efficient, scalable and maintainable environment.

Arinco’s team recognised opportunities to reduce compute usage, improve code efficiency and reduce data pipeline complexity.

Two alternative platform architectures were proposed and tested against the existing environment to ensure the best choice was made.

The client’s Azure lakehouse architecture was redesigned, using medallion principles to inform best practice.

By optimising compute usage, eliminating unnecessary resources, and redesigning job orchestration, the team reduced compute spend from $10.50 to $1.30 per full load of 90 million records.

A reusable low-code ingestion framework was introduced to simplify and standardise the onboarding of new data sources.

This made it easier and quicker to onboard new data sources with less reliance on external technical resources, which also delivered long-term savings.

The team also undertook a full audit of the codebase, working through redundant and legacy code to improve efficiency.  

Ultimately, Arinco was able to reduce platform spend by 90%, improve performance by 50%, and remove more than 8,000 lines of code from Brighter Super’s codebase.

Arinco was able to deliver the project within the originally projected timeframe despite challenges such as encountering significant technical debt, gaps in data governance, and needing to re-engineer live production workloads without disrupting daily operations or regulatory reporting.

To support long-term ownership of the platform, training was delivered with a focus on capability building within Brighter Super’s internal data team.

Brighter Super head of data analytics and performance, Lina Dickens, said Arinco was engaged to implement best practice solutions as a key phase for the company’s cloud strategy.

“Their team of experts brought a depth of skills, expertise, and a collaborative approach that helped us achieve our objectives," said Dickens.

"Their guidance and support have been invaluable, and we highly recommend their services to any organisation seeking to implement a cloud strategy.”