Customer References

Surdell makes retail advertising smarter using Oracle Cloud

Surdell and Partners, an advertising consultancy, helps retailers market efficiently using its apps powered by Oracle Application Express in Oracle Autonomous Database.

“An Oracle APEX app can be as big or small as you want.”
Adam Kanzmeier, Vice President of Customer Experience, Surdell and Partners

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Business challenges

Retail advertising rides on a complex set of factors. How do you optimize the mix of print and email marketing, deal with seasonal demand, and make the most of loyalty programs? RICON—short for “Retail Intelligence Connected”—is Surdell’s answer, based on years of working with retail buyers, coordinators, sample specialists, photographers, and allocators. Built on Oracle Application Express (APEX), RICON mines a vast swath of performance indicators in Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing to help stores gain the greatest advertising “lift,” or return on investment. For example, it helped one client increase loyalty program sales by about 3x.

Why Surdell and Partners Chose Oracle

When moving from on-premise to the cloud five years ago, Surdell considered Amazon Web Services, but chose Oracle for its superior application integration, seamless hardware-plus-software offering, and ability to add new functionality. Surdell uses the low-code agility of Oracle APEX on Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing, which lets it spin up client-specific data solutions in days, not months, while also retaining the ability to add custom code, such as specific SQL queries, procedures, and packages.

Results

By using Oracle Autonomous Database running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Surdell has reduced its CPU costs by 40 to 50 percent. Elastic compute resources help Surdell avoid paying extra for idling CPUs. The company can ramp up or down one CPU at a time, depending on demand.

Also, Surdell tailors RICON to each retailer, and the low-code agility of Oracle APEX lets it onboard new clients in just two weeks. Some of those apps comprise hundreds of pages, including forms, reports, and charts, all fed by Oracle Autonomous Database. And with Oracle APEX, there has been a more than a 90% reduction in development maintenance, from 25 resources to 2.

Using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Surdell gets the newest features as soon as Oracle releases them, such as machine learning and geolocation with Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing and faceted search on Oracle APEX. Lastly, having Surdell’s production database on Oracle Autonomous Database means that its IT team no longer worries about database patching and instead focuses on connecting with audiences.

Published:April 30, 2020