Nomadvantage taps Oracle Cloud to run its core software

Nomadvantage, based in Paris, is the developer of OpenPharma, a suite of customer relationship management software tailored for pharmaceutical laboratories and pharma service providers. Software features include order-taking, promotional operation management, contract monitoring, shelf check, and results analysis.

Nomadvantage used to host that software on its own infrastructure, managed by staffers 24/7 in its two data centers in France. However, that infrastructure was outdated and expensive to maintain, back up, and secure. It also was difficult to deploy to customers, especially in markets overseas.  

The company needed a global cloud solution not only to improve operational efficiency, but also to comply with national and regional regulations worldwide that restrict where sensitive health data can be stored.

Nomadvantage, an Oracle Database customer since the company’s inception in 2003, decided to stick with Oracle in moving its core software product onto Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

“From a technical point of view, we have always received strong support from Oracle,” says Nomadvantage CEO Olivier Wallut. Furthermore, when Nomadvantage initially compared Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s compute offering to those of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft, it was impressed with Oracle’s “day and night” support, Wallut says.

And because of its considerable usage of various Microsoft technologies, Nomadvantage liked the fact that interoperability between the Oracle and Microsoft clouds is seamless, thanks to an interconnect partnership between the two providers, formed in 2019.

A major benefit of running its OpenPharma software on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is how easy it now is to deploy that underlying infrastructure for customers. Nomadvantage executives extoll the virtues of “one-click” deployment. Ten years ago, each infrastructure deployment took about 15 days, which the company managed to get down to 3 days in its own data centers. Now it requires only minutes.

“Before the cloud, with our old system, which was a totally on-prem system, the deployments were done entirely by hand,” says Nomadvantage CTO Stéphane Apiou. “They were proprietary tools made by us. Now with Oracle Infrastructure, we have standardized everything based on the APIs proposed by Oracle. So when we need to deploy a new infrastructure for a customer and we launch the deployment, the installation is done in one click. We have a whole automated deployment chain based on Terraform, Helm, and Ansible behind it that is triggered, and in about 10 minutes we are able to deploy the new infrastructure on Oracle.”

Nomadvantage also no longer has to worry whether it has invested in enough compute capacity to meet customer demand, as the Oracle Cloud ensures that that infrastructure is scalable on demand. System maintenance is also much less of a concern. “It's much less stressful than when we had our in-house infrastructure,” Apiou says.

The move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is key to Nomadvantage’s expansion outside of France. In many cases, the company’s pharma customers need to store the health data associated with their customers that they collect in-country or in-region to comply with data sovereignty regulations; The global footprint of the Oracle Cloud data center ensures they can. For Nomadvantage, the deployment remains simple even if we have to choose an Oracle datacenter on another continent.

Meantime, Oracle Cloud gives Nomadvantage more market cred, says Jérôme Guermonprez, Nomadvantage’s international director. “When tomorrow we go to Spain, Germany, Italy, the fact of sitting on the Oracle solution compared to our solution in our data centers is a guarantee of credibility and trust for our clients and for the partners with whom we are working.”