Star CRM lifts productivity by 40% and reduces costs by 30%

Summary

The Singapore-based CRM solution provider solves its cloud infrastructure woes and cuts costs by 30% with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle APEX.

Business challenges

Star CRM, a leading provider of CRM software and services in the Asia Pacific region, has 14 different products and services across sales management, customer service, contact center, campaign management, analytics, loyalty management, and employee engagement. All of them help its clients create and deliver superior customer engagements.

Headquartered in Singapore, the company was initially focused solely on enterprise clients. However, about five years ago, it started targeting SMEs and now intends to scale that business very rapidly in the next 24 months.

Star CRM realized that without a cost-effective cloud it’s very difficult to deliver its solutions to smaller clients. Hence, the company moved its workloads from local data centers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Amazon EC2. However, the company discovered that it was very confusing for clients to understand the entire licensing model on AWS. Besides, because of the way licensing works on third-party cloud providers, Star CRM was unable to scale its hardware without changing the licensing, and was stuck with a maximum instance size and RAM size.

When it comes to maintenance like software upgrades and patching, performance monitoring, and ensuring secure configurations and management of SSL certificates, the company needed specialized database administrators, a skill that was becoming difficult for Star CRM to attract and retain.

As an alternative to AWS, the company tried Oracle and APEX on managed third-party APEX hosting providers. While these had the advantage of not requiring DBA skills, they had several limitations and were not very cost-effective. Once these services were scaled, the price was very hard to justify.

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Star CRM had to make sure that its cloud infrastructure costs did not go through the roof. It quickly needed a solution to address the ability to scale.


“In terms of cost, we've definitely noticed savings of anywhere between 25% to 30% without any impact on speed or performance moving Oracle APEX to Oracle Database Cloud.”

Sharada Qureshi
COO, Star CRM


Why Star CRM Chose Oracle

Star CRM moved its APEX workloads on-premises to Oracle Database Cloud Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), to have the latest APEX and ORDS installed, managed, and upgraded by Oracle.

Because the service is patched and upgraded automatically by Oracle, and the installation is configured securely and is optimized for performance, Star CRM had confidence in its decision to migrate to OCI.

Another reason Star CRM turned to OCI was the autonomous database as another deployment option for Oracle APEX, and its ability to autoscale CPU and memory depending on load.

Results

Moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure has enabled Star CRM to save 25% to 30% in costs without any impact on speed or the performance of its solutions.

It has eliminated many business issues associated with licensing and scalability on AWS and third-party APEX hosting providers. Also, the company has saved about 30% in costs associated with monitoring, patching, upgrading, and managing the database.

The features and functionalities provided by Oracle APEX on OCI have allowed Star CRM to complete more complex projects for clients, besides reducing development time and costs. This has increased the development team’s productivity by as much as 40%.

Star CRM has also been able to simplify the annual testing of BCP capabilities for its clients because Oracle Database can be cloned easily across regions. The company is now able to provide a level of performance with scalable costs. It pays for additional CPU only when needed.


“Oracle APEX on OCI has allowed us to reduce development time and costs. This has increased our development team’s productivity by 40%.”

Kareem Qureshi
Founder and CEO, Star CRM