Ecopaynet chose MySQL Database Service on OCI because of its superior price-performance ratio compared to AWS.
Background, Business Challenges, Goals
Ecopaynet Services & Solutions S.L., founded in Barcelona in 2015, specializes in the development of payment gateway solutions which use state-of-the-art technologies for facilitating card payments. The company's payment gateway services span all merchant channels, including electronic payment terminals in onsite points of sale, e-commerce sites, unattended payment environments such as vending machines, or a combination of these.
Ecopaynet has a broad customer base in Europe and Latin America where it offers both payment gateways and an access control application, which is currently available in a prototyped version. The company's customers come from a broad range of industries, including tourism, leisure, brick-and-mortar retail, e-commerce, and logistics.
With the expansion of digital transformation and e-commerce, payment gateway and access control ecosystems are in strong demand around the world. The company currently deploys these applications across multiple datacenters. To stay at the forefront of a fast-evolving market, Ecopaynet recognized the need for more flexibility when deploying new applications.
Ecopaynet also wished to reduce maintenance efforts and free IT resources for strategic and value-adding tasks such as developing its portfolio of services. The company must comply with Payment Card Industry (PCI) regulations which require quarterly audits of their systems to ensure data security and fraud prevention, which puts a strain on its staff.
Furthermore, Ecopaynet had prototyped an access control application targeted at organizers of recreational and community events. The application regulates the access of visitors to a specific venue such as a concert hall or a ski resort. On behalf of the promoters, the application validates entry tickets and authorizes a visitor to access the venue, detecting potential frauds such as falsified tickets with up to 150 simultaneous data entry points. Consequently, Ecopaynet wanted to gain the ability to deploy the application on demand - for example during the open-air concert season lasting from May to August.
Finally, the company wished to reduce the cost of ownership of its database and server instances while strengthening the security of the sensitive payment data that it handles.
Business Results & Metrics
Ecopaynet deployed MySQL Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as a highly performant and cost-effective platform for an access control application. The company significantly shortened time to market and empowered their IT staff to focus on service deployment rather than system administration.
"In terms of configuring and deploying a database instance, MySQL Database Service is about 90% faster than any on-premises database which gives you a lot more time to focus on the service you want to deploy," says Norberto Rodrigo.
Running applications on MySQL Database Service rather than on-premises has substantially increased the company's business agility. Ecopaynet was able to concentrate its resources on developing services such as developing communication protocols around health and safety protocols for guests who are attending events - without being distracted by system administration. "At the same time as checking the entrance ticket, we must also check now that visitors comply with all regulations around COVID in order to gain access to a venue. To develop such a procedure with limited manpower and in a short time, you need to be highly agile. MySQL and OCI give us that ability," says Iñaki Rodrigo, Executive Director.
The performance and high availability of MySQL Database Service constitutes a core benefit for Ecopaynet, since it helps the company prevent fraud. "Suppose that you have two persons with an identical copy of a QR code at two different access points of a sports stadium. If you have low latency, both will pass. With MySQL Database Service powering our application, the access information has been transmitted within a fraction of a second so that any other access attempt in that venue will be rejected," explains Norberto Rodrigo.
The company's payment gateway application - which is connected to financial institutions such as Visa, Mastercard, and American Express - ensures that merchants can instantly process customer payments. The application works across payment card providers, financial institutions, currencies, and languages. "The ease of direct payment is what drives consumer and merchant adoption. And that requires secure, fast, and scalable payment gateways such as ours that are powered by the latest technology," comments Norberto Rodrigo.
Ecopaynet uses Hardware Security Modules in its on-premises environments to encrypt sensitive information. With MySQL Database Service, security is built into the core experience with most of the security tooling free as part of the OCI environment. "Data security is a very important part when it comes to managing third-party payments," says Iñaki Rodrigo.
The highest workload on Ecopaynet's payment gateway solution occurs from Friday afternoon to Sunday. Moving these workloads to OCI allowed the company to rely on 24/7 fulfillment of service levels regarding availability, latency, and performance. "Having Oracle as a technology partner also helps us enjoy our personal life more. I don't have to worry that the platforms we are serving are unable to process payments on Saturday at 6pm, when merchants have the highest card transaction volume, whether online or in physical stores," comments Iñaki Rodrigo.
With Oracle's usage base pricing, Ecopaynet pays only for the infrastructure and platform services that they use. Since the access control application is targeted to event promoters with mostly seasonal offerings, the company will be able to turn off the service when it is not needed.
Oracle Premier Support as well as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Learning subscriptions have been a substantial help for the company when moving to OCI. "There is always a person from Oracle who can help us solve a problem. We are very happy with MySQL and Oracle. And of all the clouds out there, it is the one we are counting on," comments Norberto Rodrigo.
Additionally, Ecopaynet plans to leverage HeatWave, MySQL Database Service's in-memory query accelerator, for thousands of times faster than on on-premises or competing cloud database solutions. "We started with deploying our access control application on MySQL Database Service and, following our excellent experience, we plan on embracing OCI as our general cloud provider," says Norberto Rodrigo.
Why MySQL
Ecopaynet chose MySQL Database Service on OCI because of its superior price-performance ratio compared to AWS in addition to its robustness, agility, and trust placed in Oracle technology.
Once Ecopaynet had decided to move to a public cloud, it compared the offerings of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Oracle. "At a strategic level, I always look at the evolution and strategy of our partners. At the end of the day, the success of our company largely depends on its technology partners," comments Iñaki Rodrigo.