Aguakan cuts IT infrastructure costs by more than 50% with Oracle Cloud

In 2023, the Acapulco region was hit by Hurricane Otis, leading Aguakan to rethink its strategy of keeping its data center, server, and database technology infrastructure on-premises.

The Mexican company provides comprehensive drinking water, sewerage and wastewater treatment services in the municipalities of Benito Juárez (Cancún), Isla Mujeres, Puerto Morelos and Solidaridad. It has more than 450,000 supply contracts and serves 1.2 million inhabitants, as well as stores and hotels.

Their operations depend heavily on data, through which they have access to mapping all their contracts. In other words, having this information available in real time and accessible to different departments of the organization is essential to ensure the quality of the services provided.

And, although their structures were not directly affected by Otis, Aguakan's leaders realized they needed to ensure that their data was always secure and accessible, even in the event of natural disasters. For that reason, they decided to move to the cloud.

Aguakan chose Oracle as its provider because of its technology leadership in the cloud market, in addition to the trust they already had in the company since 2007.

They also chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because of the flexibility it offers in terms of service usability, allowing them to scale according to their current needs, complete their projects much faster, and adjust their infrastructure over time.

These capabilities also open up innovative approaches to addressing other projects and initiatives within the company.

Renewing its main server in physical data centers, as well as some secondary servers, would have cost Aguakan about 10 million pesos. By migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), that figure was limited to 4 million, i.e., savings of over 50%.

In addition, the company can download 10 terabytes monthly at no cost, and layers of protection that give them more tranquility—and that would have represented an additional cost with a different provider—and better response times, without latency that impacts their operation.

From a data point of view, Aguakan now has Oracle data protection, and does not need to worry about outages, server failures, or lack of backups.

In addition, they have real-time information, which directly impacts their business and allows them to model different scenarios with different technological approaches.

They also experienced a major improvement in their geographic information system, which they use to keep comprehensive records on their 450,000 contracts. With their newly activated GPU, they managed to efficiently meet the demand for graph processing from different areas.

The geographical information system equipment was extremely limited, forcing the company to function almost like a black box. They received information requests, which they needed to process — taking them two or three days —, and then they delivered summaries based on that info.

It was a sluggish process in times that urged for dynamism to provide more efficient services on a daily basis.

With GPU technology, they now have access to information in seconds, being able to identify the highest consumption times for each contract, customer's payment frequency (whether in arrears or not), and which water deposit feeds which "supermanzana" — which is the word used to refer to the different territorial divisions in Cancun.

Consequently, now they can generate different views adapted to different departments and approaches at the same time, something that was simply impossible with the previous model.

In addition, in the coming years, Aguakan expects to leverage OCI's artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to build models that help them reduce planning times and improve customer service, enabling them to serve a greater number of customers.

Their call center currently has 15 people, but they serve 450,000 contracts, so their capacity is usually exceeded. Very frequently, they could use a digital assistant that would help them ease that burden, which would ultimately result in a notable increase in their customer satisfaction rate.

The migration of all Aguakan data centers and servers to OCI was supported and monitored by Oracle teams, and completed based on a phased approach to ensure that the most appropriate and recent versions were being used.

Also, a work plan was defined as per the criticality and impact of on-premises servers, followed with revisions and reengineering throughout 2023 to ensure that everything was migrated correctly, especially the geographic information server, given its utmost criticality for the company. This ensured they could start using OCI already in Q1 FY24.