Bofrost moves reporting and analytics to Oracle Cloud

Founded in 1966, Bofrost has consistently defined the direct sales market for high-end frozen foods and ice cream in Germany and neighboring countries. The family enterprise, headquartered in Straelen, Germany, keeps a laser focus on customer proximity and loyalty, secured by around 7,000 delivery drivers.

To align with current market expectations, Bofrost launched a digital transformation program and adopted a multicloud strategy. It wanted new IT projects to be flexible, user friendly, and efficient, according to the company’s concept of cloud-first, best-of-breed architecture.

Within the scope of a multicloud strategy, the company could easily identify the maturity level of different providers from a user point of view. The company’s choice of Oracle Exadata Cloud Service for its data warehouse to power reporting and analytics was largely based on previous positive experiences with on-premises technology from Oracle. It was an easy switchover for the IT team, due to familiarity with the technology and performance of Oracle Database.

Bofrost already outsourced its data center years ago, so moving to the cloud was a small step. “We believed that the cloud-based approach would offer many more advantages than the static, on-premises solutions,” says CIO Catalin Barbulescu.

Migrating the data warehouse away from on-premises to Oracle Exadata Cloud Service was a lighthouse project within the company’s ongoing multicloud strategy. Reporting and analytics are now established segments, supporting cloud success in terms of customer acquisition at call centers, the online store, and mobile applications.

The new platform allows users to report and analyze data sets with improved security, performance, and uptime, compared to on-premises operations. “From the very first moment, we could already see significant improvements in performance for over 1,000 users and around 2 billion data sets with a volume of 25 terabytes,” says Barbulescu.

The Oracle Exadata Cloud Service architecture flexibly absorbed peak loads arising during the partial lockdown, as more clients started to order food from home. And the platform’s ability to scale capacity quickly as necessary  allowed Bofrost to smoothly handle increased sales volumes and stabilize delivery chains, which were under unusually high pressure.

Extracting intelligence from the data warehouse improved thanks to the scaling option of adding and removing CPUs to flexibly control performance. Other benefits included the extensive browser-based steering and control options. In addition, by adopting Exadata Cloud Service, the company now has access to the latest hardware technology and the entire Oracle software stack, without any separate licensing outlay.

Another success factor is the security provided by Oracle Cloud automated release management. “With a cloud-based solution you automatically get the latest patch versions, including hot fixes and security patches—and that’s a big advantage that is often overlooked on-premises, possibly leading to some nasty surprises,” says Barbulescu.