Acolade improves service cost and customer experience with Oracle Cloud

Acolade Consulting is an IT services provider headquartered in Australia that specializes in IT recruitment, ERP implementations, and application development, in addition to consulting services. Its customer base spans a range of business sizes and industries but is made up primarily of companies using Oracle Cloud solutions across ERP, HCM, and EPM, among others.

Oracle releases new features regularly, but before Acolade’s customers can adopt new capabilities, they need to perform testing and properly manage change across technology and people. This process can add costs and generate work among already stretched IT teams.

Acolade addresses this challenge with AssureQA, a SaaS-based, automation testing platform powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning. The platform helps companies validate Oracle Cloud Applications quickly, securely, reliably, and in a scalable, cost-effective, and easy-to-use manner.

AssureQA was developed using a number of services across Oracle’s infrastructure, software, and platform offerings, including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE), among others.

To ensure the best customer experience, Acolade hosted and tested AssureQA on several public clouds, including AWS. It selected Oracle because of its superior performance and cost.

Customer trust was another factor in Acolade’s decision to go with Oracle, because some Australian customers can be reluctant to store their data outside of the country. Oracle has two cloud regions in Australia, with locations in Sydney and Melbourne.

In addition, many of Acolade’s customers are already established in the Oracle ecosystem and have their own trusted relationship with Oracle.

AssureQA is built and hosted on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, which has brought numerous benefits. For technology teams in charge of testing and validating new features, OCI ensures 4X faster quarterly release testing at a fifth of the cost of manual testing. In some cases, tests that would take at least two weeks to complete manually now require only two days.

For business users, AssureQA results in greater security, 2X faster feature adoption, and defect-free releases. “With automated platforms like AssureQA, we can more or less guarantee 2X faster adoption of new features,” says Managing Partner Rajesh Krishnan.

Part of Acolade’s ability to deliver results so quickly is its use of OKE, which allows the company to spin up multiple clusters and enables parallel testing. Additionally, built-in scalability optimizes costs for customers. Acolade reports a 62% reduction in costs among its clients.

AssureQA’s customer onboarding is now a simple and swift process, taking only weeks to configure workflows and data in the platform.

The company also gained security benefits, thanks to the tenant isolation capabilities of Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud. Acolade can offer its customers a more secure and private service and ensure that nothing is shared with other customers—including data, compute, storage, and networking.