IS Tools improves availability and agility with Oracle Cloud
IS Tools is a Swedish IT company that develops and operates a software-as-a-service platform of the same name.
It created the platform after recognizing that business customers were demanding more frequent IT changes in order to adapt to new opportunities. The platform enables customers to design, build, deploy, and manage custom business applications themselves, without being dependent on IT specialists.
The company’s platform increases customers’ efficiency by providing a low-code means to describe process flows, and digitizing and automating them to enable seamless collaboration between all project members, including subcontractors. It currently has over 70,000 users worldwide, hosts more than 1,000 individual applications, and contains more than 30,000 forms.
Initially delivering its software for clients on premises, the company then opted to move to a cloud environment to better scale and improve its value proposition. For this it was using a local, niche cloud provider. However, the cloud service was not optimal, and IS Tools needed to improve platform availability, which is vital for maintaining its customers’ business-critical applications.
IS Tools also wanted to ease the burden on infrastructure administration, for example by simplifying the deployment of new releases, as well as improving operational and business agility.
Additionally, the company needed to ensure higher security for its telecommunications clients, which manage large amounts of sensitive data during infrastructure rollout projects.
Why IS Tools Chose Oracle
To host its flagship platform, IS Tools selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) over AWS. Because its platform was built using Oracle technology, moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was a natural choice. In addition, OCI’s pricing structure was far more suited to the company’s business model.
“Compared to AWS, it is much easier to predict how much something is going to cost on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, because it is the same price no matter which data center we are using. We like that predictability for our business. Additionally, with OCI, we get a continuous flow of new features, and good support with which to test them,” says Anders Dahlin, senior partner at IS Tools.
Results
After the OCI implementation, the company had zero platform downtime, whereas with its previous cloud service provider it was experiencing three outages and 10 hours of downtime per year. The new paradigm has considerably improved the satisfaction of IS Tools’ clients, which rely on high application availability to efficiently coordinate large telecommunications and other infrastructure projects.
OCI’s high availability, coupled with Oracle’s global presence, has also helped secure new business for IS Tools. “An important customer was recently asking us about availability, security, and contingencies in case the data center in Frankfurt burns down. So we turned to Oracle and received very good help setting up high availability solutions with data sharing between two data centers. I really didn’t think it was possible to achieve this so easily. It’s quite impressive to see how Oracle technologies have evolved,” says Johan Barrebo, founder and CEO.
Additionally, IS Tools is now able to deploy new platform releases 20% faster than before, thanks to OCI’s flexibility and automation. And with Oracle Database Cloud Service on OCI, the company can also more rapidly provision databases for large and growing telecommunications clients that require dedicated databases for their applications.
Furthermore, the company has enhanced its value proposition to prospective customers—and its credibility with existing customers—by showcasing the platform’s strength in being supported by a world-leading cloud provider with a recognized brand name. “IS Tools is a relatively small company with large clients running business-critical applications. So having Oracle as a strong and reliable infrastructure partner increases our credibility with current and potential customers,” says Barrebo.
Thanks to the OCI deployment, IS Tools has also improved data security—a key factor in ensuring compliance with GDPR and other data protection regulations. Security is especially important given both the large amounts and sensitivity of data that telecommunications clients manage in their project applications.
With a new Oracle data center opening in Sweden, IS Tools will be able to target new clients in the government or healthcare sectors, where data must stay within the country at all times. Oracle’s new data center launch will also help to improve IS Tools’ business relationships with current clients that would prefer to keep their data in Sweden rather than in another EU country.
“Our platform running on Oracle Cloud has higher performance, is more flexible, and more agile for business customers than on our previous local cloud. OCI has also streamlined our infrastructure administration, while its high availability and security options meet the full extent of our clients’ needs. ” Johan Barrebo Founder and CEO, IS Tools