RXIL (Receivables Exchange of India Ltd) is India’s first Trade Receivables Discounting System (TReDS) Exchange. Four years ago, its infrastructure was on a shared on-premise data center which constrained its scales and restricted its ability to integrate with third-party platforms. Clearly, the only way to do this was to move to the cloud. It evaluated various cloud platforms with a shopping list of requirements. It finally chose the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for their tech ramp-up. In an email interview with DIGITAL CREED, Sri Raghunath, VP-IT, RXIL explains why he chose the Oracle Cloud Solution, and how RXIL has benefited.
Edited excerpts follow:
Sri Raghunath, VP-IT, RXIL
DC: What were the challenges that RXIL faced in ramping up its infrastructure to meet its growth?
Four years ago, our IT setup was using a shared, on-premises data center. This constrained our ability to scale either IT infrastructure or platforms. Further, this also restricted our ability to integrate with third-party platforms, posing constraints at the data center edge. Analytics wasn’t easy. And we weren’t able to opt for any SaaS/cloud-based services/platforms as well.
DC: What were the selection criteria for the new cloud infrastructure solution/technology partner? Which cloud providers did you evaluate?
First and foremost, we wanted to ensure that our data at rest, and in motion is safe and secure, and complies with overall data residency requirements, i.e. data resides within the country. We also wanted an easy on-ramp for quickly adopting new technologies, while not compromising even a bit on the security aspect. For example, using API Gateway (oAuth Token-based validation), CI/CD, etc. We wanted to work with a cloud provider that offered us the freedom to administer, monitor, and manage infrastructure, without control restrictions. Finally, seamless disaster recovery and business continuity capabilities was a basic prerequisite.
We explored AWS, Azure, NTT NetMagic, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
With our move to OCI, now with an OPEX IT model, we’ll realize superior cloud economics, with approximately 30% – 40% cost savings when compared to a traditional on-premises IT setup.
DC: On what basis was Oracle Cloud Infrastructure chosen?
The obvious advantages were the pay-per-use model, and the ability to turn workloads on and off depending on our needs. We got the freedom to focus on innovations, like digital paperless on-boarding, bidding bots, etc., instead of having to spend time upfront on the basic IT infrastructure setup. Oracle’s proven expertise in securely managing the world’s most important data for over four decades, along with their enterprise-grade, second-generation cloud infrastructure, were certainly key to our decision making. The final, vital differentiator ended up being hands-on technology support by the Oracle Technology Cloud Engineering team. This was clearly missing with the other cloud providers we explored.
DC: How was your move to Oracle Cloud? Did you face any challenges during implementation? How were these overcome?
Our first challenge was separating the facts vs myths with all things cloud. As we are an RBI regulated entity, we are bound by various information and cybersecurity guidelines, and we follow these stringently. So the question for us was less on the depth and breadth of various PaaS and SaaS services that were on offer, and more on which of these services are most relevant to our business, and how do we implement them. This is where Oracle Cloud’s technology and engineering teams closely collaborated with us, and they have now become our trusted advisors. They first studied our business in-depth, understood our problem areas, analyzed the initiatives, and thereafter proposed their cloud technology services that best fit our growth objectives and business needs.
Over the next couple of years, we’ll look to leverage OCI to fast-track innovation, further elevate customer experience, and introduce new financial services/products to customers, while cutting down the transaction cycle times by at least 30% – 40%.
DC: What are the post-implementation benefits you’ve realized (or are expecting) from OCI?
By using OCI, we’ve gained the much-needed business agility to accelerate time to market and quickly introduce new capabilities/enhancements/functionalities even faster to customers. Over the next couple of years, we’ll look to leverage OCI to fast-track innovation, further elevate customer experience, and introduce new financial services/products to customers, while cutting down the transaction cycle times by at least 30% – 40%. We’ll be banking on Oracle’s cloud innovations to power us on this journey. With our move to OCI, now with an OPEX IT model, we’ll realize superior cloud economics, with approximately 30% – 40% cost savings when compared to a traditional on-premises IT setup.
We’ve initiated the process of moving our monolithic application architecture onto container-based micro-services architecture.
Further, we can now look to the future, with innovations such as bidding and service bots, robotic process automation, etc. without worrying if the underlying IT infrastructure will be able to support these innovations, thanks to OCI.