Smiles Defeats Downtime with Oracle Cloud

Summary

Customer loyalty service is all smiles after nearly eliminating downtime and boosting performance with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“We have an environment that we can scale to any need.”

Nei Henckes
Operations, Infrastructure, Cybersecurity and Sustainability Manager, Smiles

Highlights

Smiles started more than 25 years ago, as the internal loyalty program for Varig, a Brazilian air carrier. Varig was acquired by another Brazilian airline, GOL, in 2007. Smiles was spun out in a 2013 initial public offering (IPO). In addition to partnering with GOL, Smiles provide loyalty services to other companies, including airlines, banks, credit card providers, hotels, car rentals, and gas stations.

Smiles now have 140 employees, with 2020 revenues of R$1.9 billion, more than 50 airline partners, and runs the Shopping Smiles online market. Like any digital business, they require 24/7 availability, as they provide 3 million sessions, 2 million daily searches, and 2.5 million monthly transactions.

They needed scalability and around-the-clock availability to serve their 18 million members. They run their business with Oracle's Siebel Loyalty. Previously, they ran the software on their own servers, but sought to move to the cloud, for increased availability and scalability, with reduced maintenance hassles. The organization needed to eliminate downtime required when adding new capabilities or reconfiguring their service. That downtime stretched at least 8 hours, costing the company revenue during that time. Smiles needed to be able to upgrade and add new services and capabilities without going down for maintenance.

After thorough analysis, Smiles determined that Oracle is the best solution to run Siebel Loyalty, offering the greatest ease migrating the database from internal servers to the cloud. The organization migrated its database to Oracle Exadata Cloud Service with flexible provisioning of X8M systems, achieving 300% performance improvement. Also, they migrated their latest version of Siebel Loyalty to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, improving application performance by 32%. Smiles can now deliver new features with nearly zero downtime.

ROI:

300% increase in overall performance
32% increase in application performance
Nearly zero downtime in feature delivery

Read more about SMILES in this case study.

SMILES are a recognised Solution Innovator, and an Oracle Customer Reference.