IBB Adaptive accelerates software deployments and cuts costs by 60% with OCI

Supplier rebate program payments can represent a significant contribution to the profits of distributors and retailers. But such organizations experience significant challenges when trying to manually manage the quirks and complexities of myriad programs. IBB Adaptive’s BONSAI software provides a fully integrated solution to efficiently manage the entire rebate management cycle. This includes optimizing the negotiation process, maximizing revenue from rebate agreements, and ensuring that all deals are settled correctly and in a timely manner though full automation of the calculation and settlement process.

Historically, BONSAI was deployed directly on each customer’s ERP applications and technology infrastructure. With installations on many permutations of hardware and operating systems, multiple components that could impact performance were out of IBB’s control. This added complexity and reduced the ability of IBB’s limited resources to consistently deliver optimal results and constrained its ability to grow the business.

Consequently, IBB Adaptive’s leadership explored options for offering BONSAI through a SaaS model. The ideal cloud platform provider would scale to the demand of the company’s enterprise customers and free up resources to focus on expanding the business and improving the software. Cloud security for customers’ sensitive data was paramount, as well as high database performance that would reliably and accurately deliver results in line with customer expectations.

In evaluating potential cloud infrastructure providers, IBB Adaptive ran test deployments of Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Each vendor was evaluated based on pricing, performance, and ease of administration. OCI came in first in terms of cost analysis. IBB’s technical staff also had extensive experience with Oracle database. The company determined that Oracle Enterprise Database Service offered the ideal combination of flexibility, performance, and price. Plus, Oracle’s security-first approach to the cloud helped provide confidence that customers’ data and network security would not be compromised. These factors, along with the support and service the company had experience with Oracle, resulted in IBB Adaptive choosing OCI for deploying BONSAI as a SaaS solution.

Once BONSAI was hosted on OCI, IBB immediately began moving existing customer deployments to the cloud. The process became a relatively simple transfer of each customer’s business processes and architecture to OCI and Oracle Database Enterprise Edition. This reduced existing customers’ IT infrastructure costs associated with BONSAI by as much as 60%. To date, 50% of its customers have moved to SaaS.

The move to OCI radically accelerated new deployments of BONSAI. The need for on-site provisioning was eliminated. Technical staff provide a customer with an environment in minutes. Time required for new deployments fell from an average of six weeks to just one day, delivering revenue to the company and ROI to its customers more rapidly.

IBB’s technical staff enjoyed OCI’s simple and intuitive management user interface. They optimized BONSAI for efficiency on one deployment platform and leveraged the performance of OCI services. Oracle Database Enterprise Edition delivered consistent performance at scale to customers, whereas previously, performance would often fluctuate when other workloads were running on on-premises infrastructures. OCI Identity and Access Management gave IBB and its customers a cloud native approach to manage user access and entitlements with a consistent experience regardless of device, location, and service type to reduce data and network security risks. Key Management with OCI Vault helped customers centrally manage and maintain control of the encryption keys that protect enterprise data and the secret credentials used to securely access key vault resources.

With OCI and its optimal price-performance ratio, IBB Adaptive gained an even more attractive offering to add to its portfolio. Customers achieve substantial savings compared to on-premises deployments, receive better performance and quality of service, and can reduce the workload on IT departments.