Smiles defeats downtime with Oracle Cloud

Smiles, a Brazilian company that runs customer loyalty programs for consumer businesses, needed scalability and around-the-clock availability to serve its 18 million members. Smiles needed to be able to upgrade and add new services and capabilities without going down for maintenance.

Smiles started life 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 provides loyalty services to other companies, including airlines, banks, credit card providers, hotels, car rentals, and gas stations.

Smiles now has 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, it requires 24/7 availability, as the company provides 3 million sessions, 2 million daily searches, and 2.5 million monthly transactions. It needs to keep ahead of competition in the loyalty points market.

Smiles runs its business on Oracle's Siebel Loyalty Manager. It previously ran the software on its 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 its service. That downtime stretched at least eight hours, costing the company revenue during that time.

After analysis, Smiles determined that Oracle was the best solution to run Siebel Loyalty, offering the greatest ease migrating the database from internal servers to the cloud.

Smiles saw a 300% performance improvement after migrating its database to Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, providing flexible provisioning of X8M systems, as well as running the latest version of Siebel Loyalty on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Application performance improved 32%. The company is now able to deliver new features with nearly zero downtime.

Oracle provided start-to-finish support for migration to the cloud, and continued maintenance and around-the-clock monitoring for problems.