Retail software developer cuts costs more than 35% with Oracle Cloud
Profimetrics makes it easier and less expensive for customers to deploy its product lifecycle pricing and stock optimization application, thanks to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“Oracle Cloud almost mimics our solution architecture. We were impressed by its flexibility and how easy and quick it was to set up a new environment for a new customer.”
Business challenges
Profimetrics, based in Porto, Portugal, and part of the London-based Itim Group, develops an application suite that helps retail customers optimize their pricing and stock levels.
The suite’s AI-based rules engine groups products based on attributes such as type, status, rate of sale, features, and store distinctions, enabling retailers to improve availability of high-demand items while keeping inventories to a minimum. Profimetrics’ application also helps retailers plan promotions and choose markdowns that maximize sell-through while preserving healthy profit margins. A loyalty and gift card feature incentivizes additional purchases, increasing average transaction size.
Before moving its application to the cloud, Profimetrics faced two main challenges: Upfront costs of licenses for the software’s underlying database were prohibitively high, particularly for many small retailers; and some potential customers didn’t have sufficient IT expertise to manage the application infrastructure on their own.
Why Profimetrics Chose Oracle
By adopting Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), running Oracle Cloud Database, for its core application, “we could easily remove these two challenges from the beginning,” says Itim Group Solutions Director Sérgio Martins. “We could decrease massively the initial required investment for each project, and the infrastructure could be simply set up and managed by Itim.”
Because Itim already was a longtime Oracle Database customer, Profimetrics’ move to the OCI environment “was a natural step,” he says. “We decided to use the technology we already knew and could do what we wanted well.”
Martins cites several other reasons Profimetrics chose Oracle Cloud: first-rate security; a lower total cost of ownership; superior performance (partly due to the fact that Oracle has data centers near its customers); and a 99.9999% uptime SLA.
Results
Profimetrics can now set up its application for a customer on the OCI environment—which includes compute, load balancing, VPN, storage, and backup—in less than four hours.
The company estimates that it has reduced costs by more than 35% on Oracle Cloud, due in part to the fact that it can use the same environment to serve all customers. “The bigger we are, the bigger are the discounts we get”—savings the company can pass on to customers, Martins says. And if Profimetrics needs to increase performance for a customer, “the changes can be easily made by the press of a button, and the updated infrastructure is almost immediately available.”
Additionally, customers don’t have to worry about infrastructure management, patching, or obsolescence, as Oracle takes care of all of that.
Profimetrics plans to add more customers to its OCI environment and is considering adding Oracle Analytics Cloud as a complement.