Axino helps keep food fresh with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
The startup builds scalable food temperature controls for retailers quickly using Oracle APEX, REST data services, and Autonomous Database.
“With Oracle APEX and Autonomous Database, we dramatically improved our ability to develop a minimum viable product very quickly for new clients, get their feedback, and further develop to establish reliability and scalability for us to achieve rapid growth. Oracle was the only viable option.”
Business challenges
Axino builds Internet of Things (IoT) sensor systems for grocery stores, restaurants, and logistics providers to monitor and predict temperatures of refrigerated food. The Axino system lets retailers keep refrigeration within a tight temperature range and eliminate the need for a person to manually “pinch” samples of produce to check freshness—spoiling the item in the process. The Swiss startup has helped its retail customers achieve up to a 15% reduction in food waste and an 8% reduction in energy consumption.
Axino stores the retailer’s refrigeration data and applies AI to predict when food temperatures will reach an unsafe range. It then automatically adjusts the air temperature to prevent produce from getting too warm or too cold, and in the process also reduces energy consumption.
Historically, the company relied on an Oracle database hosted on-premises. Axino’s limited IT staff needed to provision and maintain adequate hardware and licenses to accommodate peaks in demand, which led to unacceptably high costs. As Axino’s business grew, this infrastructure began to constrain how fast it could build and deploy new reporting and analytical applications. Also, the company needed to embrace technologies to decrease the burden of administrative maintenance and management tasks for its IT staff.
Axino has confidence that OCI will scale to support an expected surge in data volumes as the number of IoT sensors at customer sites will grow from 8,000 to 100,000 within the next year.
Why Axino chose Oracle
As a longtime Oracle Database customer, Axino chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for its affordability, ease of use, and low maintenance development and deployment. Flexible consumption-based pricing would also let the company pay for compute and storage services only as needed. With the goals of eliminating administrative complexity and taking advantage of automated cloud technologies, the company chose Oracle Autonomous Database for transaction processing and mixed workloads (ATP). Oracle ATP would make provisioning of new instances easy and fast while also allowing Axino to scale when onboarding customers of any size.
Additionally, Axino selected Oracle APEX, a low-code development framework with Oracle Autonomous Database, to quickly build new dashboard and reporting applications for prospective clients for a fast development cycle and extension to mobile devices. Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) allow Axino to easily build APIs to connect data within Oracle Autonomous Database and share it with an APEX customer portal for better business insights.
Compared to its prior on-premises environment, Axino cut development time in half using Oracle APEX running on OCI’s Oracle Autonomous Database.
Results
After using Oracle APEX with Oracle Autonomous Database for transaction processing, Axino built a minimum viable product in only four weeks, compared to the months that its on-premises environment would have required. The company enjoyed a significant reduction in time to market.
Axino’s IoT sensor system collects the temperature and location data, then transfers the data via a network service, LORIOT, to Oracle Autonomous Database. To monitor food freshness, ORDS connects the data via APIs to the Oracle APEX customer portal.
Through its simple, interactive reporting tools, the Oracle APEX development toolkit provides Axino’s retail customers a dashboard where they can view food temperature data, configure an alarm system in case temperatures get out of range, and generate statistics, including incident reports.
With OCI’s Autonomous Database with APEX and ORDS, Axino aids in the fight against global warming by reducing carbon emissions and improving the customer experience.
About the customer
Axino is an Internet of Things technology company based in Switzerland. It helps food retailers digitize and automate their food quality management process, comply with food safety regulations, and reduce food waste.