“By moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we were able to significantly reduce our cost of IT ownership and generate increased value for our business. Oracle is the partner we needed to help us strengthen our leadership in the markets we operate in.”
Business challenges
Founded in Milan in 1945, Sisal is a leading Italian operator of online and offline gaming and betting, including around 47,000 retail outlets in Italy, Morocco, Spain, and Turkey. Aided by a custom-built betting platform—sisal.it—and a strong commitment to innovate its service offering, Sisal has steadily expanded its digital business to reach nearly 2 million customers. To support its growth, the company needed a more flexible, reliable, and affordable cloud infrastructure to support its financial planning and management applications.
Sisal has used Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle Hyperion Financial Management to manage its data-driven business. These centralized budgeting and forecasting applications integrated all of the company’s financial and operational planning processes, and ran on Microsoft Azure. However, Azure isn’t certified to run Oracle Hyperion and caused reliability issues that impacted business performance. Because Sisal also incurred high costs running on Azure, the company decided to look for a more cost-effective infrastructure option that would also deliver strong performance and service reliability.
The company considered two options: acquire an on-premises data center or move all its operations to the cloud.
Any issue that arose during the migration was solved in the shortest possible time. Working with Oracle Lift Services was excellent both technology-wise and from a project management point of view.
Why Sisal chose Oracle
Sisal decided on cloud infrastructure rather than a major on-premises data center. It chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to support its digital transformation strategy because of OCI’s reliability and flexibility. Building on a long-lasting relationship with Oracle, the company increased performance while cutting in half total cost of ownership compared to Microsoft Azure.
Results
Following an infrastructure cost simulation, Sisal migrated the majority of its web-based services and data to OCI to gain performance and service reliability. Tapping into the power, flexibility, and scalability of OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE) and OCI Functions, its web interface and application integration are now considerably faster.
The seamless integration between OCI and the company’s Oracle Hyperion financial planning and management tools enable Sisal to streamline processes, improve operational agility, and make strategic, data-based decisions more easily. OCI is helping the company as it drives a digital transformation and continues growing in the online betting market sector, increasing revenue 34% year-on-year since 2016.
Sisal noticed a sharp decrease in the total cost of ownership on OCI. Compared with Microsoft Azure, Sisal now spends 50% less, freeing up significant financial resources for other essential investments. By deploying its services in the cloud, Sisal can focus on business growth without worrying about investing in modernizing computer equipment, owning and maintaining server rooms, or purchasing new software versions.
Using Oracle Cloud Lift Services—provided at no added cost—Sisal transitioned critical data within three months with help from Oracle Consulting.
Oracle Cloud Lift Services managed the process in daily meetings with Sisal, providing expert guidance throughout, setting up all the services and database, and providing a clear architectural design.