- The first adopter of Oracle Cloud at Customer in the Japanese financial industry
provides a credit card transaction environment with long-term stability
to its members and affiliated stores - https://www.rakuten-card.co.jp/
Tokyo, 2017-Jul-10 — /EPR Retail News/ — Rakuten Card Co., Ltd. and Oracle Corporation Japan today (July 10, 2017) announced the start of live operations of the completely rebuilt core system for Rakuten Card.
Rakuten Card is seeking to become the credit card industry leader. The rebuild of its core system allows Rakuten Card to operate more flexibly in line with the expansion speed of its business, and provide a stable environment where members can use Rakuten Card services with peace of mind in the long term. Previously, several hours of downtime were required every month for the Rakuten Card members’ online service “Rakuten e-NAVI,” but with the rebuild of its core system, this regular maintenance is no longer necessary, allowing Rakuten Card to further increase the convenience it offers to customers.
The new core system for Rakuten Card is an open system which allows it to flexibly combine the software and hardware of different operators. In addition to enabling simultaneous editing by multiple users, which was difficult on the previous mainframe system, a drastic improvement in productivity was achieved by unifying the platform, architecture and development language of the core and surrounding systems.
Rakuten Card is also the first enterprise in the Japanese financial industry*1 to adopt the “Oracle Cloud at Customer”*2, which provides an Oracle Cloud environment within a company’s self-managed data center. This enables a flexible response to temporary spikes in system burden caused by certain processes, provides further enhanced processing power to match the rapid increase in Rakuten Card members*3 and transaction counts, and provides a transaction environment with long-term stability to Rakuten Card members and affiliated stores.
The project to completely rebuild the core system began in 2014, and this marks the start of its live operations.
From the start of credit card operations in the Rakuten Group in 2005, Rakuten Card has operated on a mainframe-based core system. With that platform, however, due to limits to the hardware performance, it became increasing difficulty to rapidly respond to a variety of increased burdens. Furthermore, due to both the growing complexity of its core system resulting from many years of operation and a shortage of developers experienced in COBOL, there were severe constraints from both a development and maintenance viewpoint. To resolve these various problems, Rakuten Card decided to newly adopt Oracle’s Engineered Systems offerings, “Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud” and “Oracle Exadata Database Machine”, as a technology foundation, and migrate to a Java based application. The “VENUS®” migration service provided by Jcreation Co., Ltd. was utilized for the application migration. “Java Platform, Enterprise Edition,” the standard of Java-based enterprise development, was adopted as the development language.
Furthermore, an automatic testing environment was established to ensure product quality even amid the continuous rapid changes required in response to the ever-changing business environment. “Apache Spark” was introduced based on support from Cloudera, Inc. to realize simplified distributed batch processing, an innovation which prevents the loss of processing performance. As a result of this change, the average speed of batch processing was increased over 2 times compared to the previous system, making the highly stable operation of the core system possible.
Going forward, Rakuten Card will continue to develop new services and improve its existing ones and work to create an environment which allows it to offer even greater convenience to its customers for maximum satisfaction
*1 Based on research by Oracle Japan
*2 Oracle Cloud at Customer offers hardware, software, cloud management, support and IaaS on a monthly subscription model, as well as providing a cloud environment for Oracle Database, Exadata and Java environment at a metered or non-metered fee. It is 100% compatible with Oracle Cloud, and allows usage of all the latest features.
*3 14 million Rakuten Card members (as of April 2017)
* Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.
■ About Rakuten Card
Rakuten Card Co., Ltd. launched the Rakuten Card in July 2005. The company strives to provide an environment which allows customers to use their credit card safely and with peace of mind, and aims to become the No. 1 credit card company in Japan. Rakuten Card is recognized for providing services that meet its customer needs, and it has been ranked number 1 in the credit card category for 8 years running in Japanese Customer Satisfaction Index survey by the Service Productivity & Innovation for Growth (SPRING). Rakuten Card boasts a current membership of 14 million users (as of April 2017).
URL： https://www.rakuten-card.co.jp/
■ About Oracle Japan
Oracle Corporation Japan was established as the Japanese subsidiary of Oracle Corporation in 1985. With the goal of being the “No. 1 Cloud Company” it offers its comprehensive, integrated cloud applications and cloud platform services, product portfolio that creates information value from Big Data; and a number of services that support the use of its products. Oracle Corporation Japan was listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 2000 (Security code: 4716).
http://oracle.com/jp
■ About Oracle
The Oracle Cloud delivers hundreds of SaaS applications and enterprise-class PaaS and IaaS services to customers in more than 195 countries while processing 55 billion transactions a day. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at http://oracle.com.
Source: Rakuten Inc.