Nidhi Infocomm boosts SaaS performance 5X by moving from AWS to OCI

Since its inception in 2012, the MERCI enterprise resource planning platform—provided by Nidhi Infocomm—has become one of the most popular ERP systems in India, especially within the textile industry. With Oracle MySQL as the underlying database, MERCI enjoyed rapid growth in a competitive business applications market among manufacturing, food and beverage, textile, and other industries. In 2015, Nidhi Infocomm began to move MERCI to the cloud.

In 2018 the company created a full cloud version called MERCI Global, initially hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS). After a few years, customers began complaining of slow response times and unacceptable downtime. To compound matters, Nidhi Infocomm endured several cyberattacks on the data center in Mumbai, found AWS support and security to be lacking, and began questioning costs.

In 2021 Nidhi Infocomm decided to migrate the MERCI Global platform to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and upgrade its MySQL database to Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave Database Service, running on OCI.

Already running Oracle’s MySQL as a database foundation for its ERP SaaS application, Nidhi Infocomm’s technical team was well-versed in the software. Upgrading to MySQL HeatWave was the logical next step.

The company was challenged by sluggish response time from AWS Aurora and unsatisfactory customer support. During the evaluation, Oracle’s technical team showed Nidhi Infocomm how to migrate and, once the deal was signed, moved data from AWS Aurora instances to OCI in just a few days.

Further considerations included OCI’s exceptionally high levels of speed and reliability demonstrated during a proof of concept, as well as the overall scalability of OCI and MySQL HeatWave’s in-memory analytics capabilities.

Nidhi Infocomm also appreciated the lower operating costs with OCI versus AWS, and the opportunity to offer its ERP clientele a more affordable system. The company was convinced that the Oracle solution would give it the basis for continued strong growth while meeting the dynamic changes of the highly competitive ERP applications marketplace.

After migrating to Oracle’s MySQL HeatWave Database Service, MERCI Global ran 5X faster than on AWS Aurora, allowing customers to consume constantly growing amounts of data in real time with superior levels of speed and reliability.

Customers demanding maximum uptime immediately experienced 99.999% availability through the combination of MySQL HeatWave’s unparalleled performance and the elasticity of OCI. More than 5,000 ERP customers in the engineering, manufacturing, food and beverage, and automobile sectors now enjoy maximum availability through the real-time elasticity of OCI, scaling up or down with automatic load balancing and uninterrupted operations through automatic failover and intelligent traffic routing.

For MERCI Global customers, running critical workloads with MySQL HeatWave on OCI translates to huge time and cost savings, thanks to centralized administration managed by Oracle Cloud data centers in India. Because MERCI Global now is a managed database service on OCI, Nidhi Infocomm instantly provisions new customers with MySQL instances, while providing a greater customer experience by focusing on functionality enhancements to MERCI Global.

Tapping MySQL HeatWave’s built-in high-performance in-memory query accelerator, customers gained a powerful analysis of their business processes, due to faster query handling and report generation.

MySQL HeatWave also allows users to run analytics on data stored in MySQL without a separate analytics database or Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) duplication without a separate analytics database, resulting in MERCI Global inexpensively integrating AI into its ERP offering.

MERCI Global helps customers to connect staff at HQ and in food packing houses, production units, warehouses, and other locations to share business information in real time for better decision-making that helps companies stay ahead of the competition.

OCI’s security, including always-on encryption, Web Application Firewall, and OCI Network Firewall banished the DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks that put the previous AWS Mumbai data center at risk, guaranteeing that customers have continuous access to MERCI Global’s online services.