Enabling a Global Employee Benefits Leader's Growth with a Modern, High-Performance Data Platform

About

The benefits leader is a global employee benefits & engagement company formed from a major corporation's Benefits & Rewards business. As a standalone, growth-focused organization, the global benefits platform provides meal benefits, rewards, incentives and digital employee-experience services to enterprises across multiple markets. The spin-off positioned the organization to operate with greater agility and focus on scaling digital benefits and merchant networks while meeting tighter governance and compliance expectations as an independent company.Although the organization operates globally, the India business is a strategic market — one that has already moved from paper vouchers to fully digital solutions. This shift reflects India's rapid growth as a digital-first economy, where real-time and seamless experiences are essential, driving the need for faster and more reliable database performance to support scale and innovation.

Challenges

A company becoming independent - with no margin for disruption

The organization's digital benefit ecosystem impacts millions daily in India, where disruptions would directly affect merchant revenue, meal card usage, and critical tax savings/filings. Operating as separate entities across countries meant data remained fragmented - preventing consolidated analytics and limiting visibility across the global landscape.As the benefits leader charted its path as an independent company, leadership decided on a strategic consolidation to Azure globally. The move was driven by the need for unified infrastructure to support rapid growth, enable advanced analytics across all entities, and build a foundation for AI adoption. With this Azure-first strategy set, the organization needed the right database platform to support their Oracle workloads in the new environment.

1. Strategic move to Azure required the right Oracle database platform

• The organization's global consolidation to Azure meant moving away from AWS RDS, but they needed a solution that could handle their growth trajectory and performance requirements.
• Growing at 25% CAGR, their workloads demanded advanced tuning capabilities, flexible replication topologies, and enterprise-grade SLAs - requirements that would be critical on their new Azure foundation.
• The migration wasn't just about moving databases; it was about establishing a scalable, high-performance platform that could support the organization's next phase of growth.

2. Urgent need for operational independence and governance

• The hub-and-spoke model the organization wanted required centralized governance across multiple Azure subscriptions, RBAC and persona-level controls, and the ability to segregate environments (prod, non-prod, DR) while retaining a single control plane.
• The organization needed a repeatable, auditable way to manage DB estates and cross-region policies.

3. Performance impact on business-critical processes (batches, payouts)

• With the India business growing at over 25% annually, transaction volumes and data workloads were expanding rapidly. Their existing environment struggled to keep up with this pace leading to slow overnight batch runs, delayed reconciliations, and the risk of merchant payout delays or SLA breaches. The performance pressure was most visible in the India business, where batch latency had become a recurring operational challenge.
• Unpredictable performance made capacity planning risky and slowed product/market rollouts.

4. Resilience, DR and compliance shortfalls

• Required RTO/RPO targets and a clean multi-region DR strategy could not be implemented within the constraints of the existing RDS topology.
• As an independent, publicly visible business, the organization also faced higher expectations for demonstrable backups, encryption, data residency and audited controls.

5. Cost & licensing complexity during separation

The spin-off required rethinking Oracle licensing and consolidation strategies (multiple DBs per server, license optimization) to control run-rate costs while moving to a new cloud platform. Tessell's DB consolidation and Oracle PaaS positioning were relevant to this problem.

The Solution

Tessell enabled the organization to migrate from RDS to Oracle on Azure in under 60 days delivering a secure, high-performance foundation that unlocked operational independence post spin-off.

Unified platform delivery: Tessell's Oracle-on-Azure deployment templates provisioned a secure, enterprise-grade database environment - fully integrated with Azure governance and monitoring giving the organization a turnkey production estate from day one.

Built-in performance optimization: Tessell's intelligent sizing and tuning engine right-sized compute, isolated workloads, and optimized database parameters - removing CPU contention and stabilizing batch performance.

Centralized governance controls: The platform's native RBAC, subscription-level policies, and hub-and-spoke model support allowed the organization to enforce consistent security and compliance across regions without custom scripts or manual oversight.

Resilience by design: Tessell's HA/DR framework applied predefined recovery policies and automated failover orchestration, enabling the organization to meet enterprise-grade RTO/RPO targets with confidence.

License and cost optimization: Through multi-database hosting and automated license tracking, Tessell reduced licensing complexity and improved cost efficiency during the spin-off transition.

Day-2 operational autonomy: Tessell's self-service console, automated runbooks, and integrated observability dashboards empowered the organization's teams to manage provisioning, patching, and monitoring independently - minimizing reliance on external operations.

Outcome

• Fully managed Oracle PaaS on Azure with no Lock-in to ensure smooth day 2 operations boosting operational efficiency
• ~50% Oracle License Optimization for Non-production workloads with Multi DB service
• Enhanced data resiliency with 99.99% availability and ~ 0 data loss
• 40% reduction in monthly batch cycles leading to faster service delivery
• Effective & seamless Migration from RDS to Tessell PaaS on Azure in less than 60 days

Looking ahead

With Tessell, the global benefits platform now operates on a stable, scalable platform that's built for continuous growth. The focus for the next 6–12 months is on turning platform stability into strategic advantage - scaling confidently, driving automation, and translating operational strength into measurable business outcomes.Together, the organization and Tessell will:Scale reliably to support continued high growth without disruption or rework.

Convert operational wins into business impact - enabling faster launches, stronger resilience, and sustained cost efficiency.

In essence: the benefits leader is moving from stability to velocity using Tessell as a growth platform, not just an infrastructure solution.

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