Cultura Inglesa shortens development cycle of new projects with OCI

Based in São Paulo, the Cultura Inglesa Association is one of the premier English-language learning schools in Brazil. With operations throughout the country, the company offers workshops in English conversation, grammar, writing, translation, subtitling, and standardized test preparation.

In recent years, the company underwent significant consolidation via mergers and implemented modernization efforts aimed at process optimization, which required a robust technology landscape. However, the company faced several technical challenges while operating in an on-premises environment. The limited scalability of its infrastructure made it difficult to handle spikes in demand or adapt to idle capacity outside these periods. Cultura Inglesa’s IT team also faced complexity in creating new test and approval environments, which compromised the speed to implement new projects. High operating costs due to infrastructure maintenance and cybersecurity requirements were also challenging factors.

Cultura Inglesa chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to support its technology innovation efforts. The company already had an established relationship with Oracle at its São Paulo headquarters, but OCI also delivered better price-performance compared to the competition, as well as the scalability and elasticity required to support its systems at peak times. OCI could also bring more simplicity in generating new environments for new application development, testing, and approval.

After the migration to OCI, Cultura Inglesa’s IT team provisioned new compute resources in up to 20 minutes, rather than days, because there was no longer a need to purchase, manage, and configure hardware. Additionally, the migration to OCI saved hundreds of thousands of reais in the technology budget.

The company also optimized the development cycle and reduced the time required to deliver new projects from months to weeks, allowing for a faster response to the needs of business teams. This speed was achieved by using solutions such as Oracle Integration to integrate systems and data so they work together more efficiently. OCI also generated greater system resilience and availability of information. Cultura Inglesa cut costs related to database replication and disaster recovery, bringing significant gains in efficiency and security. Backup management became more secure and monitored, and replication in another geographic zone helped to ensure that the environment could be rebuilt in just two hours in the event of disasters.

OCI also allowed IT staff to quickly respond to demand increases. The institution can scale resources automatically during peak periods, avoiding access bottlenecks and maintaining a high uptime rate, with more than 99.5% availability.

Finally, Cultura Inglesa also adopted Oracle Autonomous Database, which delivered real-time insights, better performance when querying data and APIs, and faster execution of continuous performance tuning and improvements. With Oracle Autonomous Database, the company also reduced the need for compute resources by using only 3 OCPUs, compared to the initial forecast of 12 to 16 CPUs.