Costa Rican SaaS ISV secures growth trajectory by automating invoicing, point of sale receipts, online reservations, food ordering, inventory management, and other aspects of hospitality with MySQL HeatWave in OCI.
Introduction & Background
Procom, based in Costa Rica, provides software and hardware solutions for various industries. The company faced challenges managing individual clients from a San Jose data center as they expanded globally, leading to performance and storage issues. Seeking scalability and efficiency, Procom migrated from on-premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with MySQL HeatWave.
Business Challenges & Goals
For 20 years Procom managed each client individually from a data center in San Jose running MySQL Community Edition. But as time went by, certain corporate clients branched out into more than 20 countries by outsourcing food supplies to airports and other companies—activities that involved processing and invoicing up to 100,000 orders per day.
Performance and storage began lagging as data sets grew to 50 million electronic documents. Retaining documents for corporate compliance became untenable and client relationship managers struggled to meet customer demands.
To grow the business, the company recognized it was time to move to the cloud, seeking a platform that would scale with its customers and remove administrative burden. At first Procom experimented with Azure before selecting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), with MySQL HeatWave as the back-end database.
Business Results & Metrics
By migrating to MySQL HeatWave, Procom increased application performance, availability, and scalability. This enabled Procom to deliver critical service level agreements (SLAs) for invoicing, point of sale receipts, online reservations, food ordering, inventory management, and other aspects of hospitality. Performance increased 25% with MySQL HeatWave.
MySQL HeatWave, deployed in OCI Mexico, delivered a 25% cost savings by eliminating the need for the on premises data center, hardware, storage, and software licenses. In addition, the company found that it could halve the number of technical client relationship managers due to the numerous administrative tasks that could be automated with OCI.
The company no longer needs specialized IT staff for patching, updating, and managing the on premises data center. In addition, there is more automation for client onboarding, subscription management, and other manual tasks. This has enabled Procom to pursue business development at an accelerated pace.
Procom also enjoys the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage platform that helps it fulfill service level agreements (SLA) that previously were becoming unfeasible to honor, such as data retention requirements. Hospitality providers and other customers have recognized the higher performance and availability and have gained peace of mind as they are now able to comply with 10-year data retention laws and regulations.
Peace of mind also comes from enhanced security. Procom’s middleware solutions are now buttressed by numerous OCI security services which provide transparent data encryption (TDE), data masking, audit, user authentication, automatic backup, improved point-in-time recovery, flexible load balancing, web firewall, and more.
Managing an ever-growing database with tens of millions of documents and millions of invoices generated per year, allows for data analytics and proof of data retention compliance.
MySQL Support is acknowledged by Procom as the driving force in ensuring a smooth transition to the cloud, providing not only technical expertise but deep industry understanding and assistance in change management. MySQL Support’s proactive involvement helped Procom re-engineer its business model from a limited growth on-premises silo into a solid, long term revenue-generating concern.
Why MySQL HeatWave?
Procom needed a powerful database to accommodate exponential data growth. After 20 years of on-premises data center experience, it decided to shift infrastructure management to a cloud provider. As the developer of MySQL, Oracle had launched MySQL HeatWave as a cloud database service making it easy to migrate all of its systems to OCI.
In making its decision, Procom was further persuaded by the proactive interest in its business model shown by the MySQL Support team and MySQL’s willingness to steer the company through the change management process of migrating from on-premises to Oracle Cloud.
Implementation
Assisted by the MySQL engineering team, Procom successfully migrated all services to OCI. The live migration involved moving data from on-premises MySQL Community Edition to MySQL HeatWave in OCI. The process was completed within 24 hours, providing Procom with confidence in its growth trajectory.
“The migration was amazing. The speed of moving data from one side to another was fantastic and it was really gratifying to have that support from Oracle. I am not worried anymore that growth might lead to collapse,” said Christián Vargas.
>Next Steps
Procom now plans to deploy a disaster recovery site on OCI. It will also be sunsetting all legacy instances of Microsoft SQL Server, finally consolidating all software and systems on Oracle Cloud.
The next move is to take full advantage of the analytical potential of the huge volume of data at its disposal. Procom is preparing a strategy for using MySQL HeatWave’s in-memory query accelerator and built-in machine learning for offering customers insights and predictions that will add value to their business. An example of how Procom plans on mining the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Object Storage data lake is to accurately determine daily product needs per area and identify sourcing providers.
Procom expects to launch its analytical services in 2024.