SoftwareOne case study

SoftwareOne delivers savings in the AWS Cloud

Modernizing Oracle applications for AWS Cloud

Transocéanica used an automated tracking system to track commercial containers. However, the system had limited functionality. It wasn’t scalable and couldn’t generate customer notifications. Lack of schedule coordination led to complaints and constant traffic congestion. SoftwareOne consulting helped to develop a new, efficient, and cost effective system that runs in the AWS cloud. The result is reduced management overhead and substantially lower licensing expenses. Advanced tracking capabilities enable multiple new functions, automation, and a ninety-nine percent reduction in operating expenses.

Client: Grupo Transocéanica
Industry: Other
Services: Migration of the company’s tracking system to Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Country: Ecuador

About the client

Tercon Container Terminals is a national company, part of Grupo Transocéanica, which provides high-quality storage and repair to both dry and refrigerated containers. It currently provides services to four international shipping lines and two international container leasing companies.

The challenge

Moving and tracking commercial containers is at the core of Transocéanica’s business. However, the company’s container tracking system had limited functionality and the application was unable to create customer notifications of changes in schedules or routes. The application was not scalable and was only available to one booking agent per warehouse and only limited to internal Transocéanica users. The home-grown application was hosted in an on-premise datacenter and ran a Linux operating system using an Oracle database.

Transocéanica recognized the need to redevelop their application to scale and add new features but had budget challenges due to increased infrastructure requirements and software license costs. A decision to implement a new system became even more urgent when a key customer highlighted constant traffic congestion caused by the lack of delivery information and demanded immediate resolution.

A man in a blue shirt looking out a window.

The solution

Transocéanica’s development team had created the logic for the new application architecture using Java and node.js but did not have the necessary IT infrastructure required to scale and meet the expected demands of 30,000 import/export container movements and 1,500 daily agency transactions. Also, no budget for additional server infrastructure and Oracle licensing had been approved in the IT budget putting the scheduled deadline in jeopardy.

Transocéanica’s CIO turned to SoftwareOne for an evaluation of cost-effective alternatives. SoftwareOne proposed a three-phase optimized cloud strategy (Assess > Mobilize > Modernize) that migrated the new platform to Amazon Web Services (AWS). A detailed application and architecture assessment determined the AWS infrastructure requirements and a migration readiness assessment helped Transocéanica understand their readiness to operate in public cloud for the first time. A detailed business case analysis estimated cost savings of almost ninety-nine percent over three years when compared to the legacy onpremises hosting option.

SoftwareOne proposed a cloud architecture using cost-effective serverless components and a database modernization strategy which involved migrating the Oracle database to PostgreSQL and using Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service). Using Amazon RDS not only reduced ongoing database management overhead costs but converting to open-source PostgreSQL removed the costly Oracle licensing expense. The new platform is cost-effective and easily able to cope with peaks in demand and is highly available and fault tolerant with automated backups. With the serverless architecture in place, requests are made through API calls which has allowed tracking metrics to be created that identifies which warehouse originates a request and how many Lambda functions are called. Tracking metrics have improved cost visibility and enabled internal cost chargebacks to be efficiently processed at month end.

To meet the aggressive deadline and assure project success, SoftwareOne held over 80 hours of technical enablement workshops for Transocéanica’s Operations and Application Development teams. SoftwareOne supported the development team in converting their database from Oracle to PostgreSQL and through the adoption of new cloud-native AWS services including AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway and Simple Email Services (SES) which provided the basis of new application features such as customer notifications. Beyond delivery and implementation, the sessions covered architectural best practices and detailed how to re-use portions of the existing backend authentication code to be deployed in AWS. With this new knowledge Transocéanica’s development team can innovate more quickly and deploy new services and features.

The result

The outcome of this transformation project is improved customer satisfaction, reduced management overhead through automation and substantially lower operating expenses.

Improved end-user satisfaction with real-time customer notifications and new functionality
Increased business efficiency with improved warehouse capacity management decisions using real-time usage data
Reduction in operating costs by ninety-nine percent through database modernization available and fault tolerant with automated backups
Improved application availability scalable and handles peak traffic with ease
Reduced time-to-market for application development and deploying new features