MetrôRio gains performance and cost saving benefits by moving to OCI

MetrôRio is a rapid transit network that serves the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The rail operator experienced a decline in passengers during the pandemic, with daily subway travel falling from around 900,000 passengers to below 150,000. The decline caused MetrôRio to lose almost 90% of revenue and put the company at risk of financial crisis.

At that point, the Brazilian subway operator exited from the transportation holding company Invepar, which controlled the IT infrastructure MetrôRio used to run its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. new holding company, Hmobi, part of Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund Mubadala. This shift forced MetrôRio to restructure its entire back office for administrative, accounting, control system, and train maintenance processes.

Reabsorbing the requisite SAP licenses gave MetrôRio continuity, but the company either had to enter a heavy capital investment with new data center resources or optimize its debilitated cash flow by adopting an operating expense-based cloud computing solution.

To migrate the SAP ERP system from its former controller company to its own infrastructure, MetrôRio ran a competitive cloud tender process in which Oracle came out as the winner. Access to Oracle Exadata Database Service was a key factor in its decision, given that the company’s SAP ERP system has resided on Oracle Database since inception.

The move to Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), with no capital expenditure and predictable operating expenses, was considered the best way forward, especially since MetrôRio had only six months to find a solution and execute the migration before exiting from the Invepar IT framework.

By adopting OCI as its new back-office platform, MetrôRio avoided the capital-intensive investment that a new data center would have incurred. After going live in mid-2022, with passenger volumes still 30% lower than pre-pandemic levels, the company rapidly began to reap the performance and cost saving benefits of moving to OCI.

Compared to the capital expenditure involved in purchasing servers, cabling, cooling, and database licenses, and factoring in the 5-to-10-year hardware refresh routine of a data center, the move to predictable consumption-based billing with OCI helped MetrôRio save an estimated 35% over 5 years.

Coupling its data-intensive ticketing app to the lower processor requirements of Oracle Exadata Database Service and the granular scalability of OCI gave MetrôRio more command over cash flow through predictable operating expenses and judicious use of Oracle Universal Credits.

With the elasticity of the cloud and simplified management of Oracle Universal Credits, MetrôRio can easily adapt its operation to manage peaks in demand and maintain cost and performance optimization.

The high performance of Oracle Exadata Database Service underlying the company’s SAP applications gave internal users a welcome acceleration in response times and report generation. For end users, OCI’s high availability and scalability meant more than 99% uptime, which is crucial to running a public transport system 24/7 serving a metropolitan population of over 13 million people.

Thanks to the tight teamwork of Oracle and SAP engineers, MetrôRio’s transition was smooth, with both manufacturers working hand in hand to tune the optimum topology and configuration for the new cloud platform.

The new architecture was implemented in cooperation with SERVICE IT, a Brazilian systems integrator specializing in cloud adoption acceleration and a member of the Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), which uploaded SAP modules to OCI and supervised the functional roll-out.