Wiser: Pushing the education frontier by migrating its SAP environment to Google Cloud
About Wiser Educação
Wiser Educação, a constellation of EdTech organizations with over 29 years of education market experience, aims to enhance student employability. It provides education solutions to 186 countries under several brands, including Wise Up, Wise Up Online, Wiser Sales Platform, Number One, MeuSucesso.com, Power House, Buzz, Conquer, MedCof, Offi-C, Aprova Total, and Eu Militar.
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About SantoDigital
Consultancy firm SantoDigital specializes in cloud services to bring digital transformation to the Brazilian market.
By migrating its SAP environment to Google Cloud with the support of SantoDigital, Wiser improved its operating efficiency and increased business profitability.
Google Cloud results
- Ability to process over 321 million student requests per month.
- Development and maintenance of 80 apps on Google Cloud’s platform.
- Expansion of the international coverage of education solutions to 186 countries.
Costs reduced by over 30% thanks to the cloud.
The mission of Wiser Educação, a constellation of EdTech organizations, is to transform the future through education by increasing student employability. Present in the Brazilian market for over 29 years, this holding company operates under several brands, including Wise Up, a school of English.
In the past few years, this education conglomerate has expanded its ecosystem to provide education to more and more people. Today, the company's portfolio also encompasses brands such as Wise Up Online, Wiser Sales Platform, Number One, MeuSucesso.com, Power House, Buzz, Conquer, MedCof, Offi-C, Aprova Total, and Eu Militar.
As the organization's goals are closely tied to technology and innovation, Wiser constantly prioritizes the use of solutions that are increasingly scalable and efficient. In 2018, the company chose Google Cloud to migrate its data.
"Our main cloud-based strategy is now focused on scalability so we can reach all students effectively and provide a high-quality educational experience," says Marlon Oliveira, Wiser's CTO.
The company has leveraged several Google Cloud products, including Google Kubernetes Engine to run automated workloads at scale, BigQuery to accelerate queries over large data sets, and Cloud SQL to efficiently manage databases ensuring operational integrity.
Higher demand, a new challenge for SAP
Although Wiser was already using a SAP system to optimize its internal processes and guarantee efficient, integrated management across company areas, in 2020 the team identified the need for a more robust infrastructure, which was indeed growing.
After the social distancing measures due to the COVID-19 pandemic, online education became the norm, and students massively migrated from in-person to digital models.
For example, before the pandemic the company had about 80,000–90,000 online students, a figure that rose to 300,000 within just a few months after the pandemic struck. This significant increase in demand led to more and more scalability and management problems.
"We obtained an extremely large volume of students and contacts and had to provide all of them with quality, demand-based support. And this was only possible through a scalable platform such as Google Cloud."
—Marlon Oliveira, CTO, WiserWiser based its decision to migrate its SAP system to Google Cloud on multiple factors, including the need to ensure cost efficiency and increase reliability for the services provided.
As a partner for this rollout, the organization turned to SantoDigital, a company that had already been involved in other digital transformation projects together with Wiser even before the SAP migration.
The strategic consultancy company was in charge of the entire architecture design process, from planning to implementation. "Although Wiser relied on a SAP Business One environment, its multiple connected systems made the migration slightly more complex," explains Alan Pires, Sales Executive at SantoDigital.
To overcome this challenge, Compute Engine was used for the migration. This solution runs business applications on Google Cloud within just a few minutes while data is migrated transparently in the background.
After implementation, Wiser could rely on a SAP infrastructure fully synchronized with other systems and suited to meet several back-office company requests. It also optimizes data management and protects the integrity and security of essential operating information.
"Deploying SAP on Google Cloud involved a comprehensive modernization process for Wiser Educação, which can now offer educational services that are more advanced, efficient, and aligned with dynamic market demands."
—Alan Pires, Sales Executive, SantoDigitalIn addition, operating efficiency enabled the company to explore other innovative solutions with Google Cloud. "Today, we can run several SAP integrations and conduct analysis based on various data sources, and we have discovered the possibility of using new tools," highlights the company's CTO, Marlon Oliveira.
Amplifying online education through technology
The results Wiser obtained after implementing SAP on Google Cloud are clearly visible. Thanks to the scalability achieved, the company can now process an average of at least 321 million monthly student requests, thus meeting their educational needs even in high latency periods.
Another relevant benefit relates to the substantial reduction in infrastructure costs compared to previous solutions. The education company managed to lower cloud costs by +30%, enabling it to allocate financial resources more efficiently.
"Previously, deploying updates or launching new resources required more time and effort. Now, with Google Cloud's scalable infrastructure and integrated tools, our implementations are faster and more efficient."
—Marlon Oliveira, CTO, WiserAs the educational market is a constantly evolving niche, relying on a scalable infrastructure for SAP has enabled Wiser to accelerate time-to-market around new features and provide a more agile response to students' needs.
All this is evidenced by the nearly 80 applications the company has developed and maintains on Google Cloud's platform, which demonstrates the diversity of solutions offered.
Geographical expansion is also another benefit attained since the implementation. Previously, the company served 84 countries, but now its solutions are used in 186 countries.
Creating new knowledge paths with artificial intelligence
Leveraging the advantages of its internal data infrastructure, Wiser now has more time and availability to think about accelerating innovation in education.
"We offer teaching and learning platforms suitable for a variety of contexts, from languages to soft skills, and they all include many features, such as virtual tutors with custom learning paths, enabling users to interact and obtain specific responses based on the materials we have," explains Marlon Oliveira.
In a not-so-distant future, the education company is planning to use large language models (LLM) based on Gemini, the largest and most capable AI model Google offers, to continue adding more value to its educational products and services.
Tell us your challenge. We're here to help.
Contact us
About Wiser Educação
Wiser Educação, a constellation of EdTech organizations with over 29 years of education market experience, aims to enhance student employability. It provides education solutions to 186 countries under several brands, including Wise Up, Wise Up Online, Wiser Sales Platform, Number One, MeuSucesso.com, Power House, Buzz, Conquer, MedCof, Offi-C, Aprova Total, and Eu Militar.
About SantoDigital
Consultancy firm SantoDigital specializes in cloud services to bring digital transformation to the Brazilian market.