ValeCard Supports 40% Annual Growth, Gains a 15-Fold Improvement in Fleet-Management and Benefit Card Data Processing
 
 

ValeCard Supports 40% Annual Growth, Gains a 15-Fold Improvement in Fleet-Management and Benefit Card Data Processing

  • Oracle Customer:  ValeCard
    Location:  Minas Gerais, Brazil
    Industry:  Financial Services
    Employees:  400
    Annual Revenue:  $500 Million to $1 Billion

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Founded in the Triângulo Mineiro (Mineiro Triangle) in the city of Uberlândia 17 years ago, ValeCard offers benefit and fleet management services through electronic payment methods with extensive operations throughout Brazil. The company is a central part of Cephas Group —formed by DentalShow (a dental plan) and BlockAuto (a vehicle tracking startup). The electronic card company’s rapid expansion has made it into one of the largest companies of its kind in the country.

Over the last two years, ValeCard has grown by 40% each year in revenue and transaction volume. Having reached one million active cards in Brazil, ValeCard decided to update its IT environment with the best product on the market and therefore chose to adopt Oracle Exadata Database Machine. With this solution, the company gained the ability to ensure redundancy, transaction protocols, and excellent performance— achieving a 10- to 15-fold processing improvement and total availability, thus enabling its customers to conduct transactions 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from ValeCard

  • "Oracle Exadata Database Machine’s technology offers the cutting-edge processing we need to provide to our customers with benefit cards and fleet management. We had been operating over capacity, but with Oracle Exadata, we’ve solved all of the IT performance and availability issues that had affected our business." – José Geraldo Ortigosa, Operations Director, ValeCard

  • Update IT environment to support a sustained 40% annual growth in revenue and transaction volume, as it had experienced in the previous two years
  • Keep the IT environment running without interruptions or delays to serve the company’s one million cards it manages annually
  • Improve stability of fleet management portals for customer accessibility

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Implemented Oracle Exadata Database Machine to meet ever-increasing storage and processing demands and achieved a robust, fast, stable, high-performance data environment, thus allowing the company to grow revenue, expand its customer base, and improve transaction speed by 10 to 15 times
  • Raised the availability of the fleet management portals to 100%, improving service to customers who completely depend on this tool to manage their vehicles and who had been negatively impacted by system interruptions, due to slowness and interruption issues
  • Freed IT resources that had previously had to monitor transaction flows to minimize service interruptions, allowing them to instead dedicate their time to the company’s more strategic activities
  • Ensured compatibility with hardware and systems from Oracle and other suppliers, such as business intelligence, enterprise management systems and a call center with 100 attendants
  • Achieved database redundancy through Oracle Data Guard, ensuring database availability for processing cards
  • Eliminated downtimes that had occurred an average of twice daily, for at least 15 minutes, resulting in praise from customers for improved speed and stability to access card and fleet management data

Why Oracle

“Given our rate of growth, we needed to update our IT environment with the best product the market had to offer,” said José Geraldo Ortigosa, operations director, ValeCard. “We researched several different brands, and Oracle Exadata Database Machine proved to be an excellent choice, as it offers redundancy, cutting-edge technology, transaction protocols and excellent performance. In addition, it has no compatibility problems with other hardware and software brands.”

Implementation Process

The implementation of Oracle Exadata Database Machine took less than four months to complete. The team counted on Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services at all times. Carried out in stages, the implementation involved the migration of all of the company’s databases to Oracle Exadata—taking two weeks for each migration. “We could not afford to take risks. We did all of the planning with Oracle’s team, combining the supplier’s expertise with our business knowledge, so that everything went perfectly,” Ortigosa said.

Partner

“Ação Informática was a very important part of this process, as it had worked with us, side-by-side, as a member of the same team, always aiming to achieve perfect conditions, so the Project could be concluded on time, within cost and scope,” said José Geraldo Ortigosa, director of operations, ValeCard. 

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