Bliva helps the travel industry go digital with Oracle APEX and Autonomous Database

Bliva, a software company founded in 2001 in Sweden, has been an Oracle customer from its beginnings. “Bliva has a long and rich history of working closely with Oracle. In 2000, the founder of Bliva—by that time CEO of another partner company called Mind Insight—received the prize for the Most Influential Business Partner in EMEA directly Larry Ellison,” says CEO Lennart Ereback.

Bliva designed its applications to solve challenges that travel companies faced due to the pandemic. The main one helped improve communication with travelers during their journeys by providing real-time information about trip and entertainment options.  The second one helps travel agencies provide more valuable services than just ticket purchase and hotel booking.

To develop and deploy these applications faster in a dynamic economy, Bliva needed a more agile and scalable platform than a traditional on-premises environment.

Bliva selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Oracle Autonomous Database for the superior price-performance ratio compared to other solutions. The autonomous cloud database eliminates many complex administrative activities such as provisioning, patching, tuning, and securing, so Bliva gains excellent performance while cutting operational costs and saving time.

Also, the company discovered that Oracle Autonomous Database included a low-code application framework, Oracle APEX,  that delivered an unprecedented combination of superior data management and rapid deployment.

Using Bliva’s Oracle-based travel app solution Blieasy, travel agencies improved the way they communicate with customers. Bliva’s agile platform, running on Oracle Autonomous Database for transaction processing, simplified registrations and sign-ups for activities. Blieasy ensured that all travelers could access the same information and the latest updates.

Oracle Autonomous Database also helped Bliva cut costs while improving services. The loading time of Blieasy pages was, on average, twice as fast as before, and no code changes were needed to deploy it in Oracle Cloud. Operational costs for the production environment dropped by about 80%, because Bliva’s IT staff no longer had to manage backups, patches, or upgrades.

Also, the company no longer needed enterprise database licenses in order to handle peak loads during significant events. Ereback says: “With Autonomous Database on OCI, we can scale up and down as we see fit and pay only for capacity we use. If we had continued in our own environment, we would have needed to upgrade our database licenses to handle peak workloads. This represents a major cost saving.”

Bliva Blieasy was built with the Oracle APEX low-code platform. Together with Oracle Autonomous Database, APEX gave Bliva a scalable and proven infrastructure for its applications. Oracle’s architecture enabled fast data access, unmatched performance, and instant scalability to meet Bliva’s demands. “Thanks to OCI, we were able to deliver a flexible and scalable white-label solution without any problems,” says Ereback.

Clients using Blieasy noted several crucial business benefits after Bliva moved to OCI, including reduced administrative costs and operational time, improved customer experience that led to many returning customers, increased revenue for extracurricular activities, and higher brand exposure.