Grupo DTG improved customer satisfaction, boosted operational agility, and reduced costs by migrating from Amazon RDS to MySQL HeatWave.
Introduction & Background
Servicios Informaticos E-Brain (Grupo DTG) is a service company based in Valparaíso, Chile that develops software, applications, and cloud computing solutions including ERP, CRM, analytics, and supply chain management.
Founded in 2012, the company offers SaaS solutions for various industries. One of its core products is Go Truck, a growing transportation management system (TMS) handling the mobilization of 34,000 inbound containers per year.
Business Challenges & Goals
Grupo DTG began running its SaaS applications on GoDaddy before moving to DigitalOcean as its workloads grew with business expansion. Still not getting the database performance and availability it needed, the company migrated to Amazon RDS, but service levels did not improve as expected. “We thought AWS would give us a whole world of high availability, but in practice, it was not delivered,” said Donoso.
Due to excessive downtime, the company’s clients were losing reputation and revenue.
Database bottlenecks significantly impacted software performance, and AWS’s United States-based data center was further increasing the latency between applications and end customers.
AWS’s responses to Grupo DTG’s repeated requests for support were slow and ineffective, creating an environment of great pressure on the company’s database team to meet client service levels.
Grupo DTG needed a faster, more robust database with a highly scalable infrastructure to manage increasing workloads. It needed high availability to improve its business proposition to current and future clients. It was also looking to increase database security to meet regulatory compliance requirements, and to reduce its overall cloud services costs.
Business Results & Metrics
Grupo DTG significantly improved customer satisfaction, gained new business contracts, boosted operational agility, and lowered total cost of ownership (TCO) by deploying MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in Chile.
The company has not experienced a single incident of downtime with Go Truck.
“OCI responds extremely well to periods of stress or high server load. And in the event of a crash, there is an automatic failover to a new database server with all our information synchronized. The high availability of MySQL HeatWave has completely changed our lives, and we are no longer constantly stressed,” explained Donoso.
With a powerful, high-availability database platform supporting its applications, Grupo DTG now delivers a far superior experience for its clients and end customers. Client sales teams no longer miss out on deal-closing opportunities due to server downtime. This has significantly improved membership retention rates, boosted client revenue, and enhanced Grupo DTG’s reputation as a dependable technology partner.
By moving from Amazon RDS to the Oracle Cloud, Grupo DTG reduced its monthly total cost of ownership (TCO) by 20%—a significant saving for an IT company specializing in SaaS applications.
The reliability of MySQL HeatWave on OCI has enabled the company to gain new business for its core SaaS applications. “Go Truck’s new ability to seamlessly handle the fast-paced and demanding trucking industry in Chile has been crucial and has attracted more customers through positive word of mouth,” Donoso said.
The IT services firm now has the flexibility to rapidly scale its environment according to business needs. “In the past, it was very difficult for us to make our systems scalable due to infrastructure issues. But with MySQL HeatWave, we found a solution that allows us to change instances and increase capacity with three or four clicks,” Donoso commented.
By transitioning its servers to the Oracle Cloud in Chile, Grupo DTG decreased latency by a factor of ten, ensuring lightning-fast application response times for hundreds of thousands of customers.
They enhanced its data security by using OCI’s out-of-the-box security features and by implementing Oracle Guardian to monitor its entire environment, classify error types, and proactively alert database administrators when a server needs a new patch or when a bug is discovered.
The company received valuable security tips from Oracle Support and is currently implementing Oracle Web Application Firewall (WAF), which uses artificial intelligence to detect and block suspicious IPs and prevent SQL injection and denial of service attacks. The company now benefits from faster, more knowledgeable, and more personalized support for its database and infrastructure.
“Unlike with DigitalOcean and AWS, the people in the Oracle and MySQL Support teams have been phenomenal. To be able to trust our technology provider and feel totally accompanied on our journey is invaluable,” said Donoso. Oracle Support also assisted Grupo DTG with the entire migration process, which was conducted overnight with zero business downtime.
Why MySQL HeatWave?
Group DTG underwent a thorough review of multiple providers in search of an optimal cloud platform. While taking crucial factors such as performance, scalability, security, and pricing into account, the pivotal aspect for the company was database availability.
During its research, the company discovered that MySQL HeatWave displayed exceptional availability and performance on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), surpassing that of Amazon Web Services (AWS). Furthermore, relocating its servers to the Oracle data center in Chile would decrease latency even further.
“With MySQL HeatWave on OCI, we were able to achieve the same level of performance as AWS using only half the amount of CPU and RAM,” explained Juan Donoso.
Following a detailed selection process, Grupo DTG confidently selected MySQL HeatWave on OCI as the best solution to run its vital Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business applications.
Next Steps
Grupo DTG is currently assessing the capabilities of MySQL HeatWave to create a marketable analytics solution for its clients, many of whom have used their own business intelligence until now.
With MySQL HeatWave and OCI now fully operational, the IT company is favorably positioned to continue its business expansion both in Chile and abroad and is in the process of opening its first office in the United States.