iAdvantage Software gains agility by moving to Oracle Cloud
iAdvantage Software speeds time to market, lowers costs, and reduces risk by migrating its eStudy SaaS application and data to Oracle Autonomous Database and Azure Interconnect.
“Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing has helped us reduce our system administration and development costs, while providing more security, reliability, and scalability. With incredible support from Oracle’s sales and engineering teams, we were able to successfully move our important application and data expeditiously.”
Business challenges
The world’s population will reach nearly 10 billion people by 2050. All of those people will need more, high quality food than is being produced today. Agronomists, the people who study the science of producing plants for food and fuel, conduct studies that improve crop quantity, quality, and safety. iAdvantage Software, based in North Carolina, helps scientific leaders and farmers gather data and complete biological studies in a timely manner.
iAdvantage’s eStudy application ensures that data is consistently collected from various sources, securely encrypted, and shared with study teams as fast as possible. Data integrity must be compliant according to GxP guidelines and regulation with pharmaceutical and food industries, which involves electronic signature capture and audit trails.
iAdvantage relied on on-premises IT infrastructure in a co-location contract that was up for renewal. The software company considered if there was a more flexible, scalable, and cost-effective solution available to run its eStudy platform.
Why iAdvantage Software Chose Oracle
iAdvantage Software had successfully used Oracle Database services for about 20 years and helped the company establish credibility. After reviewing many other cloud providers, the company picked Oracle for technical excellence in cloud infrastructure, and autonomous database for security, performance, and scalability. Oracle was also selected for the quality of the team that engaged with iAdvantage Software quickly, understood the company’s risk, and provided all the right resources for a successful migration without interruption to its customers.
Results
Advantage Software decided to move its eStudy application and data to Oracle Transaction Processing database service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, and Microsoft Azure Interconnect. Together, iAdvantage Software and Oracle completed the migration well before a twelve month deadline and without disruption to existing customers.
By migrating to Oracle Cloud and Microsoft Azure, iAdvantage Software gained more performance, scalability, and utility, while still providing a fast, seamless experience to its customers. Transaction performance increased by 3X to 4X. Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing’s autoscaling capabilities, which use AI and machine learning to recognize patterns in workloads and adjust capacity accordingly, helps the eStudy application accommodate the extreme peaks and dips associated with seasonal data collection for peak performance, and minimizes costs.
Since moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, iAdvantage Software can review and control its entire software hosting method, which has provided a new sense of agility and security. It can now quickly spin up a new software trial for a customer in less than a day, in contrast to being major effort before that took about two weeks. Because the autonomous database automates all patching, updating, and backing up, the company has reduced its administrative costs. Automatic encryption in the database protects data and provides advanced auditing. FastConnect allows iAdvantage Software to connect its Oracle Cloud Infrastructure virtual cloud network via dedicated, private, high-bandwidth connections with its eStudy contributors on-premises. These benefits have helped iAdvantage Software reduce downtime and risk to free up its teams to focus on delivering their enterprise-level software solutions.
Additionally, using the Oracle APEX low-code development environment, which is built into Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, iAdvantage Software can build and deliver reports to monitor key performance indicators on dashboards that are available on any device, and easily filter and drill down into the data for deeper insights and be more responsive to their customers