The IOT innovator shortened time to market, improved performance by 25%, and reduced cost by 40%, by implementing MySQL HeatWave Database Service on OCI.
Introduction & Background
Viatick is an Internet of Things (IOT) firm that delivers plug-and-play monitoring and related solutions to help companies lower insurance costs and accident rates, increase productivity, and reduce implementation times.
Founded in 2014, the company uses Bluetooth technology to provide asset and personnel tracking and contact tracing services, as well as detailed industry ready analytics, through its SaaS platforms Jarvis, BMS, and Safe Event Tool.
Viatick envisions a world where tasks are made simpler with data from artificial intelligence of things (AIOT) technology, and it aims to transform businesses with the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to make a bigger and greener impact.
Business Challenges & Goals
For its core IOT SaaS platform Jarvis—an indoor positioning tool for monitoring personnel and assets—Viatick was running MySQL Community version on AWS, Huawei Cloud, and other cloud infrastructure providers.
Solid business growth coupled with the pandemic brought a surge in demand for the company's products. Viatick needed a more manageable database service, as its engineers were spending too much time on manual processes cleaning the data and building and training AI models for their clients. Data backups, analyses, and processing were also highly labor intensive.
The company further wanted to reduce its infrastructure and database costs, and also gain more transparency around how it was being charged for its cloud services.
Viatick also wanted to enhance its service offering, by accelerating product demos and providing more flexible monitoring templates, to reach new customers and geographical markets.
Business Results & Metrics
Viatick accelerated time to market, enhanced its value proposition, decreased operational costs, and saved developer time and effort by deploying MySQL HeatWave Database Service as the backbone for its personnel and asset tracking SaaS platform Jarvis.
The company greatly increased database manageability by using MySQL HeatWave on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), saving significant amounts of operational time. Analysis is now simplified, backups are automated, and Viatick optimizes its databases by leveraging Oracle's infrastructure to enhance AI and monitoring processes.
Viatick's developers can now build and train ML models faster, shortening time to market and enhancing services to customers. For example, the company recently presented a customized AI demo to a government agency in Singapore within one working day, which would have been impossible with its previous cloud providers.
Building ML models with MySQL HeatWave AutoML is more cost effective and accurate compared to other cloud providers. The ability to build models faster, at a much lower cost and with better accuracy enables developers to build models more frequently based on the most recent data.
MySQL HeatWave AutoML offers in-database machine learning which means models can be built, and predictions and explanations can be generated, while data or models stay within the database. In-database machine learning offers better security for data and models, and eliminates the complexity involved in creating ETL process to move data in and out of the database. It also makes the most recent data available for building models, and there is no need of external third-party libraries for model building.
In addition, model and prediction explanations can be generated using various explanation techniques for all the regression and classification models created with MySQL HeatWave AutoML. Explanations enable a user to identify important data attributes for the model.
MySQL HeatWave has given Viatick's customers the flexibility to choose the type of AI model that is right for their individual business. This is particularly advantageous as the company already works across 12 vertical markets and is looking to expand its customer base. New and prospective clients can now simply select their preferred model from a dropdown list and click to run the process—underscoring Viatick's philosophy of enabling customers to manage their data ‘via a tick'. Customers can also let MySQL HeatWave AutoML select the best suitable model if they do not wish to use a specific AI model.
The IOT innovator improved database performance especially when processing large amounts of data by deploying MySQL HeatWave on OCI to replace MySQL Community version on AWS. It can already demonstrate a 25% performance improvement to clients wishing to migrate their data, and expects to double this figure as it grows its business and implements the full scope of MySQL services. Overall API performance has been improved by 0.2 seconds per invocation.
The company has also dramatically increased scalability. For example, the provision of personnel and asset monitoring services to multiple hotels with hundreds or thousands of rooms was previously unthinkable. But with the Oracle Cloud platform, Viatick can easily scale to meet demand, enabling it to offer its solutions to hotel chains and other global customers with large data sets.
"In anticipation of converting all its current customers to MySQL HeatWave, the company expects to reduce its annual database and infrastructure costs by approximately 40%."
Viatick has also improved cost management and built greater trust with its customers thanks to Oracle Cloud's transparent subscription model, which has eliminated the bill shocks and opaqueness which the company experienced when running on AWS. Using OCI, the company's monthly infrastructure costs are currently 23% lower than they were on AWS, with further cost optimizations expected.
Why MySQL HeatWave Database Service
Viatick used MySQL Community version since its inception, and began its cloud journey on Digital Ocean, Softlayer, Azure, and Amazon.
To manage its growing business and reduce costs, Viatick decided to deploy OCI. Viatick then started learning how MySQL HeatWave Database Service AutoML could provide more database flexibility for its AI and monitoring needs.
"When we were looking to optimize our database and processes, we saw a real difference with MySQL HeatWave in terms of performance and support. For example, training the data for machine learning took much longer in AWS—and showing it was an entirely separate process. But with MySQL HeatWave AutoML it's a single step and I can show it instantaneously," Edmund Gair said.
Implementation
Viatick enabled a smooth database migration from AWS and Huawei Cloud to the Oracle Cloud within just 10 business days by leveraging Oracle Premier Support. Oracle created a dedicated channel where its engineers, technical support, and account managers provided continual assistance throughout the implementation of MySQL HeatWave Database Service, making sure that the shape of Viatick's solution met its current and future business needs.
Having expected the implementation to take at least three months, Viatick, with Oracle's support, had already completed the migration at the 30 day mark—and with zero downtime. The high levels of care and responsiveness from Oracle significantly boosted Viatick's confidence and success rates when showing their solutions to new and existing customers.
Next Steps
Viatick is continuing to roll out MySQL HeatWave Database Service for its current government and corporate clients, while looking to integrate further strategic solutions from Oracle, which will enable it to penetrate high barrier to entry markets such as casinos.
With the implementation of MySQL HeatWave complete, Viatick is ready to go global and market its solutions in 44 countries. It has already begun servicing customers in Malaysia, Vietnam, Myanmar, and China, and is currently looking into the Philippines, Africa, and Mexico.