MindChamps achieves high availability while reducing costs by 60% with OCI

MindChamps is a Singapore-based firm that provides early childhood education, from preschool to tertiary levels. It holds the #1 position in market share of premium preschools in Singapore, and has additional schools in Australia, the Philippines, Myanmar, Malaysia, and Indonesia. MindChamps’ ChampsLMS is a SaaS-based learning management system catering to preschool, primary school, tertiary education, and corporate training.

The company was an early cloud adopter, but under its previous cloud provider, it lacked the high availability needed in the education space. “In today’s business, we can’t afford a system to fail even for a minute,” says CIO Shan Gandhimani.

Slow support was another challenge. Whenever the service went down, the company had to fill out a ticket and wait patiently for its previous cloud provider to respond. This process could take days or hours, which severely impacted business flow. Also, managing servers, security, and backups were laborious tasks for the IT team.

Given that MindChamps used cloud solutions, business leaders felt compelled to ensure data protection for itself as well as for its customers. To establish a solid foundation for cybersecurity, the company turned to Oracle for help.

The company’s technology team has a long-term strategy to adopt cloud technologies for SaaS products as a new revenue stream. To do so, MindChamps needed a robust, secure, and cost-effective system.

After comparing the costs of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with other cloud providers’ products, Shan and his team opted for OCI due to its significantly lower cost, better support, and promise of high availability, efficiency, and security. Oracle not only offered guidance on the architecture, but also provided a proof of concept in two weeks. In addition, Oracle gave deep-dive workshops to address any concerns about the new technology.

Shan was impressed by Oracle’s support. “The entire team comes, sits down, and talks to us with smiles on their faces. It was an amazing thing. It gave us much-needed confidence to move forward.”

As soon as MindChamps migrated to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), the company saw a cost savings of between 40% and 60%. It eliminated complex management tasks so that the IT team could focus on upgrading features for its in-house products.

Unlike similar products in the market, ChampsLMS is powered by OCI and includes AI-driven features such as adoptive learning and learner’s behavior. “The AI engine will look at the learning ability of an individual and suggest the best learning module suitable for each learner,” says Shan.

The company also adopted Oracle MySQL HeatWave. Its performance improved significantly with zero downtime after moving to OCI. Knowing that the human brain gets tired after too many clicks, ChampsLMS comes with an easy navigation feature. Whether a student wants to submit an assignment or take an online class, no task requires more than two clicks. Such considerations for adaptive learning greatly enhanced the learning experience for both kids and adults.

Using OCI, the company improved the efficiency of its application and database platform. The costs saved allowed MindChamps to offer free onboarding for the first three months for its customers.