The cinema audience never sees the database. It sees the advertisement before the film. Somewhere behind that apparently simple transaction sits a business system that must survive seasonal peaks, protect its records and keep working while its owners change the machinery. In August 2025, Screenvision Media announced that Cintra had moved its core systems to Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in twelve weeks, with no business disruption.
- Cintra helps enterprises move, modernize and operate critical databases.
- Customers can keep Oracle, optimize its costs, or replace suitable workloads.
- The work joins architecture, licensing, automation and ongoing support.
The cloud was the easy part
Screenvision’s announcement described the constraints: resilience, data protection, scalability and license compliance. A private equity mandate added urgency. Cintra designed the architecture, automated the Oracle migration and continued supporting the result around the clock. The customer’s relationship with Cintra already stretched fifteen years. A twelve-week project depended on knowledge accumulated over much longer.
That is a useful introduction to this New York database specialist. Cintra occupies the space between deciding that a company should modernize and making its existing applications work afterward. Its technical vocabulary includes Oracle clusters, PostgreSQL, cloud interconnects and disaster recovery. Its commercial vocabulary includes support contracts, license entitlements and the cost of keeping yesterday’s choices alive.
Screenvision’s August 2025 customer announcement.
One database, two possible futures
Cintra’s Database Anywhere and Database Freedom programs explain its position neatly. Anywhere preserves Oracle while changing where and how it runs. Freedom considers alternatives, including PostgreSQL. Both require discovery, design and migration. The distinction matters because moving an application and replacing its database are different undertakings, with different risks.
At logistics and repair company CTDI, a major customer wanted its system moved to AWS. Keeping Oracle raised licensing and disaster-recovery concerns. CTDI initially considered Aurora MySQL. Cintra’s comparison pointed instead toward PostgreSQL, citing compatibility and suitability for the workload. The recommendation changed the destination before the migration began.
Cintra advised on configuration and helped train CTDI’s team to operate the new platform. The customer account reports recovery times falling from four to eight hours to under an hour. The telling detail is who ran the cutover: CTDI itself. Expertise had become something the customer could use without permanently borrowing the expert.
Usage · dependencies · licenses
Rework the economics.
Validate the application.
An invoice is part of the architecture
The first deliverable can be a better inventory. Cintra’s AWS Optimization and Licensing Assessment examines utilization, existing entitlements and dependencies, then models deployment options and costs. Remapped.ai supplies discovery and assessment automation. The exercise brings finance into the architecture discussion while choices are still changeable. An oversized workload can become an oversized cloud bill remarkably efficiently.
For a technology leader, the assessment is also a way to make competing assumptions visible. The database team can describe the features it needs. Finance can examine the licensing baseline. Operations can specify recovery requirements. Each proposed destination can then be judged against the same workload. This is the practical value of doing discovery before selecting a migration target.
Consider Zema Global, whose analytics platform serves energy, commodities and financial businesses. Cintra’s September 2026 account describes an aging Oracle environment creating stability and scaling risks. An AWS-funded assessment and migration program preceded its move to OracleDatabase@AWS on Exadata. Cintra reports approximately 15 percent lower total cost of ownership, with no new Oracle licenses required. Oracle remained; the commercial and operational arrangement changed.
“Organizations want simplicity and minimal risk when it comes to their Oracle enterprise systems.”
Brendan McNamee, Cintra co-founder, 2017
The buying unit also matters. Cintra sells professional projects and recurring managed services alongside automation products. Modernize[IQ] is licensed per database. Replicate[IQ] uses gateway-server cores, with monthly or annual terms. AutoScale[IQ], which adjusts Exadata CPU allocations within defined limits, ties its subscription to measured savings. Those structures give buyers concrete questions to ask about scope, duration and incentives.
The people behind the cutover
A database contains more than records. It can contain procedures and functions that encode years of business rules. Cintra’s Modernize[IQ] addresses this layer with AI-assisted conversion from Oracle PL/SQL and Microsoft SQL Server T-SQL to PostgreSQL. The offering combines automation with expert validation. Replicate[IQ], powered by HexaReplicate, adds continuous data movement, live verification and reverse replication for fallback.
Operations then become their own product. Sensor provides continuing monitoring and specialist support. Cintra’s August 2026 Stratos Global Services account describes 43 Oracle RAC clusters and reports 99.99 percent trading-platform availability. These are customer-specific claims, but they reveal what the buyer values: someone who understands the platform when a small technical problem threatens an operating business.
That continuity helps explain the business model. A migration has a finish date; patching, monitoring and incident response continue. Customers can buy assistance for a particular transition or retain an operating partner. The important purchasing decision is where responsibility sits afterward. CTDI’s internal handover and Sensor’s managed coverage represent different answers to the same question.
The company’s institutional memory reaches back to its 1996 registration. A 2017 announcement identified Brendan McNamee and Abdul Sheikh as co-founders; Sheikh remains prominent as CTO. Its partnerships span Oracle, AWS, EDB and the Temenos ecosystem. Cintra’s stated culture emphasizes development and inclusion. Beyond database work, it sponsored former Royal Marine Craig Hunter’s Everest charity expedition. Even the database people occasionally leave the building.
Start with the workload
For a buyer, Cintra belongs on the shortlist when database behavior and licensing are central to a cloud decision. Alternatives include an internal database team, a cloud provider’s services organization or another specialist consultancy. Cintra’s case rests on combining technical depth, commercial analysis and operational responsibility. The comparison should turn on the actual estate and the proposed scope.
The transferable sequence is straightforward: measure usage, reconcile entitlements, compare destinations, validate compatibility and rehearse recovery. Assign the people who will own production before approving the move. An Oracle exit becomes less attractive when application dependencies, required features or conversion effort swallow the projected savings. Keeping Oracle can be a considered decision. Changing the hosting address alone proves very little.
A useful proposal should therefore show the retained-Oracle option beside the replacement option, with implementation effort and ongoing operations included. Ask what must change in the application, how the team will test it, and how it will recover if cutover goes wrong. Those questions make a savings estimate worth discussing.
Screenvision’s audience still sees an advertisement before a film. The useful achievement happens elsewhere: a company can reconsider the machinery underneath its business while the business continues to run. Cintra earns its place in that conversation by making the options concrete enough to choose.