Sasha Banks-Louie, Oracle BRANDVOICE brand contributor, wrote in Forbes about how three very different companies all improved customer experience by leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The article looked at how Jio, GreenGo, and Adlib leveraged OCI to meet their customer experience needs.

How Jio Leveraged OCI

As Rohit Sharma led India to a 6-wicket win over South Africa during the Cricket World Cup on June 5, millions of fans hit Reliance Jio’s mobile streaming application to tune in and cheer for Team India. Bursts of viewers ranging from 100,000 to as many as 5 million users would hit the app at the same time, as India’s manic enthusiasm for the sport propelled a total of 20 million subscribers to stream the live match from their mobile phones via Jio, India’s largest mobile telecom company.

Sudden bandwidth spikes like these can blow through a company’s physical server capacity and cause outages and delays that ruin the experience, and send customers straight to a competitor. Since cloud computing infrastructure is elastic, meaning it can scale up for massive workloads, and back down when demand lets up, upgrading to a cloud infrastructure can help businesses provide reliable service without worrying about their server getting overloaded.

Of course, companies could always add more physical servers, but that takes a lot of time, and it gets expensive, fast, requiring more data center space, staff, and electricity.

“We have to handle these kinds of bursts, and give our customers the same great experience, no matter how many CPUs or bandwidth servers we need.”

-Gaurav Duggal, Jio’s Vice President of Technology

Duggal says Jio ran the live cricket streaming app on bare metal servers on Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud Infrastructure, and it got faster CPU cycles and better IOPS performance than when it ran similar live sporting events on shared virtual machines from other providers.

Delivering great customer experiences on a massive scale isn’t just a luxury afforded by deep-pocket corporations. Since cloud services are delivered virtually on an “as-needed basis,” companies of all sizes can manage ebbing and flowing workloads, without breaking their backs or their budgets.

How GreenGo Leveraged OCI

Car-sharing startup GreenGo offered just 45 electric cars to customers in Budapest when it launched its eco-friendly service in 2016. A year later, the company had expanded its fleet to several hundred Volkswagen e-up! vehicles in the city. Co-founder and managing director Bálint Michaletzky knew the company needed 300 cars in Budapest to reach its profit targets, but what he didn’t know was how the company was going to operate such a fast-growing mobile business.

“We didn’t have the technology infrastructure to remotely track so many cars, open them, lock them up, send invoices, and receive payments.”

-Bálint Michaletzky, GreenGo Co-founder and Managing Director

GreenGo started running an instance of Oracle Database on a colocated server, but sharing the server with several other companies led to random CPU allocations that would often leave the startup in the lurch. Michaletzky said that GreenGo had customers hitting the app and requesting cars, but the server simply wouldn’t respond, especially during peak hours.

GreenGo now runs its car-sharing platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, starting with a two-server setup. Initially, it had one running two CPUs, and the other with four CPUs. After load checks, however, the company opted to upgrade both servers to four CPUs.

“The entire double setup and switchover took us less than a day. If we were still running in an on-premises environment, this kind of an upgrade would have taken us four weeks or more to order a new server, set it up, and then start the migration all over again.”

-Bálint Michaletzky, GreenGo Co-founder and Managing Director

The company is expanding into the Czech Republic, where it plans to offer 200 VW e-ups! in Prague by the end of this year. Due to this, Michaletzky said GreenGo may need to upgrade from four CPUs to eight. Even so, they expect to complete the entire migration in half an hour.

With one instance running in Frankfurt, and another in London, Michaletzky attributes GreenGo’s nearly perfect service availability to Oracle’s redundant networks and power supplies. When the company was running on-premises, Michaletzky says it had multiple network and power outages, which could last up to seven hours. Everything is dependent on the server, and if it’s not available, customers don’t have service.

On Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, if anything happens in Frankfurt, they still have London, which is exactly why GreenGo went with Oracle.

How Adlib Leveraged OCI

Adlib’s business involves quickly turning huge volumes of unstructured paper files, emails, or images into organized and searchable data. It does so using a toolkit of optical character recognition, automated data extraction, artificial intelligence, and big data analytics, for what it calls an “intelligent data conversion platform.” Doing all that requires enormous compute power and storage capacity—capabilities Adlib’s own data center didn’t have.

“One of our customers had to process 40 million documents within a three-month period. It would have been really difficult for us to deploy all of that with physical servers.”

-Mike Grainge, Adlib’s Vice President of Product Engineering

Adlib helps companies in highly regulated sectors, such as oil and gas, pharmaceutical, insurance, and banking, quickly bring new products to market, while meeting strict compliance requirements and deadlines. With its platform, Adlib identifies important information from unstructured data, and then converts it into a format that makes it easy to analyze, through a process that can include running it against machine-learning algorithms to help classify the data. Once the data is converted into a “high-fidelity” asset, Adlib’s customers can then use the document to understand, for example, which product ideas and strategies it should develop to enter new markets. It’s also valuable to quickly identify information that’s needed for audits or regulatory compliance.

After hitting a wall in its on-premises data center, Adlib initially migrated to Google Cloud Platform. However, communication latency delays that could hit 6 milliseconds or more between different data center locations caused problems. While that might not sound like much, Grainge explained that this amount of latency drove up costs and the amount of resources needed to meet specific time-sensitive processing SLAs for customers.

Last year, the company switched to Oracle’s Gen 2 Cloud Infrastructure, and the time has dropped to about 1.5 milliseconds.

“When you’re talking about millions of customer documents, that significantly reduces the amount of infrastructure we need to meet our customers’ processing requirements.”

-Mike Grainge, Adlib’s Vice President of Product Engineering