Chilean provider of SaaS marketing and loyalty solutions delivered 99.99% uptime, and improved security and compliance by migrating to MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Introduction & Background
Celmedia Fidelización is a Chilean company that designs and develops SaaS marketing fidelity systems for B2B customers. After launching business activities in 2010, its loyalty solutions have expanded from Chile into other parts of Latin America. Its retail, banking, healthcare, commodities, and telecommunications customers currently subscribe to loyalty services that reach 40 million users in Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay.
Celmedia Fidelización’s customized fidelity services provide consulting, fidelity platforms, points programs, web portals, e-commerce and marketplaces, marketing campaigns, digital marketing, and strategies for transforming transactional and unstructured data into knowledge used to secure customer loyalty. Celmedia Fidelización’s offerings also cover brand alliances, sales force motivation, behavioral analysis, and multichannel communication.
Business Challenges & Goals
Celmedia Fidelización’s solutions demand robust front and backend structures and rigorous compliance with data protection standards, including SOC 2 and ISO 27001. They also require the ability to scale horizontally and vertically according to periodic surges in load, especially during intensive marketing campaigns.
The company’s local data center running MySQL Community Edition, with no cloud provider commitment, was unable to provide the high availability and scalability necessary to support growth.
To resolve its challenges, the company decided to move to a cloud platform that would free it from data center constraints and give it independence in resource management. It chose to migrate databases and applications to MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Business Results & Metrics
With total control over its infrastructure configuration, Celmedia Fidelización has been able to increase IOPS, central processing unit (CPU) speed, and overall response time—resulting in faster time-to-market, higher SLA guarantees and a better user experience.
“After migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), uptime rose from 93% to 99.99%, response time dropped from over 300 milliseconds to below 200 milliseconds, and pages that previously loaded in 10 seconds now open in a fraction of a second,” said Fernando Perez, IT Director.
As a result of higher performance, the company has lowered SLA incident resolution time from 3 days to under one hour. Setting up a new client in the data center takes less than one hour versus one week before.
The horizontal and vertical scalability of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resulted in a doubling of concurrent users to 17,000, while concurrent database connections increased from 300 to over 4,000 users. Network transfer rates—previously in megabytes—have risen to gigabytes.
Along with the ability to scale and grow, Celmedia Fidelización now controls resources and therefore costs. Dissatisfied with other providers’ hidden costs, it enjoys the OCI transparency of data movement pricing, with the ability to move large volumes of data between the Oracle cloud regions at low cost. “With OCI we can identify every cost associated with the traffic of each client. That has been a great benefit,” said Fernando Perez, IT Director.
Crucially, as a critical business systems provider to large enterprises, Celmedia Fidelización has gained peace of mind thanks to OCI’s compliance with data security standards worldwide. Hosting its solutions in the Oracle cloud regions of Santiago and Valparaiso in Chile as well as São Paulo in Brazil guarantees that all customer data meet governance regulations for their specific industries. Security policies that before relied on third party tools are now integrated in OCI and monitored in real time. Celmedia Fidelización uses the full gamut of OCI’s security layers, from access control list to customer isolation, data encryption, and endpoint protection.
OCI’s multitenant architecture ensures Celmedia Fidelización’s customers that their data is kept separate from others. Furthermore, OCI segmentation isolates areas of the network that are subject to compliance standards. Such features have solidified SLAs and contributed to raising customer satisfaction.
Celmedia Fidelización uses OCI Monitoring for monitoring system logs to weed out any anomalies affecting performance, while OCI Load Balancer ensures that tasks running in MySQL HeatWave are smoothly distributed between cluster nodes to prevent performance issues.
MySQL HeatWave’s horizontal and vertical scaling means that online surges during high volume loyalty marketing campaigns are handled routinely thanks to the ability to seamlessly distribute spikes in traffic to different nodes and zones.
OCI Vulnerability, a CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) scanning service, has resulted in zero infrastructure vulnerabilities. Celmedia Fidelización also uses OCI Bastion, which provides unified connection to all OCI services integrated with its customers’ business systems. Other administration tools deployed include OCI Vault, part of OCI Data Integration, a container for user credentials visible only to the infrastructure team.
Why MySQL HeatWave?
After exhaustive technical and cost analysis of its requirements for horizontal and vertical scaling, Celmedia Fidelización decided that Oracle had the most powerful solution and a roadmap for expansion.
The decision-making process included running a proof of concept (PoC) to test the behavior of a critical service exposed to surges in traffic, previously the greatest challenge in its data center. The results were beyond expectations. In parallel, it conducted a PoC on MySQL HeatWave’s analytics, testing data extraction and modeling under various scenarios.
Before taking a final decision, Celmedia Fidelización asked one of its core customers from the financial services industry to validate Oracle’s proposition. The Oracle and MySQL team took part in meetings with the stakeholders to explain OCI cybersecurity and compliance with SOC 2, ISO 27001, and other norms. The financial services corporation deemed that OCI and MySQL HeatWave met the standards required for data security, and Celmedia Fidelización then decided to migrate its systems to MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Implementation
With the help of Oracle and MySQL, Celmedia Fidelización migrated all customer apps and internal systems in real-time with no system downtime. In addition, a backup of data saved before a major hacking incident in the data center was successfully restored inside OCI.
“During migration, Oracle helped us understand the data structures we had to improve and to get higher performance and faster time to market; it was a tremendously valuable learning curve,” says Fernando Perez.
Next Steps
Celmedia Fidelización is assessing how best to use MySQL HeatWave to complement its current use of machine learning and artificial intelligence for analyzing and comparing campaigns results, among other strategies. The company intends to take maximum advantage from the OCI ecosystem in terms of constant innovation and renovation so that it can create maximum value for customers. “We need time to digest everything on offer but will definitely continue to invest in the relationship with Oracle in order to grow our business,” comments Carlos de Guillermo.