Drop Tank Digital Transformation Initiatives

About the Customer

Based near Chicago, Illinois, Drop Tank specializes in gas station loyalty technology and loyalty solutions, with thousands of participating locations. Drop Tank partners with fuel and convenience store brands to deploy consistent loyalty functionality across sites that often have an inconsistent retail technology. Drop Tank's solutions unlock loyalty capabilities and a wide range of data services for consumer packaged goods companies and fuel marketers of all sizes.

Scope and Challenges

Drop Tank, a US developer that serves a growing base of more than 3,500 fuel and convenience stores, is using Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse to power a loyalty and rewards system that automatically drops the price of gasoline for members, while simultaneously capturing, analyzing and managing the data collection process in order to unlock customer insights on behalf of suppliers like Marathon Oil.

During the launch event, Oracle also brought in Droptank, a loyalty vendor for a gas station and convenience store brands, and Data Intensity, a Cloud developer, to demonstrate how these young companies are making use of the latest Oracle products to handle tasks. The former provides real-time access to Oracle Cloud Database with thousands of point-of-sale locations and a projected 50x transaction boost in 2019, while the latter focuses on accelerating hundreds of Cloud migration use cases by using Oracle Autonomous technologies.

Outcome and Implications

Using Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse’s self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing capabilities, Drop Tank has greatly reduced the overall time needed from DBAs as compared to more cumbersome competitive database offerings. With the Oracle Cloud Platform fully integrated, Oracle SOA Cloud is used to rapidly provision and link directly to gas station host systems to capture fuel and consumer goods data, eliminating the need for developers to write additional software.

Oracle Autonomous Database provides the industry’s first self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing database cloud service. It’s built on unique Oracle data management technologies, including Oracle Exadata Database Machine, Oracle Database 18c, Oracle Real Application Clusters, and Oracle Multitenant, plus algorithms using artificial intelligence to make it autonomous.

Quotes

“As our loyalty programs began to evolve and reach more consumers, we needed a more efficient way to seamlessly manage and scale to enable more partners to leverage our network. By choosing Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, we can automatically set load marks and scale, making it easy to support new campaigns without having to worry about time-consuming exercises like indexing, patching, and tuning.” -said Timothy Miller, Vice President of Technology, Drop Tank.

“Today’s market dynamics require companies to constantly look for innovative new ways to meet customer demands. By bringing the capabilities of the Oracle Autonomous Database to companies of all sizes, the complexities of configuration, administration, and tuning are eliminated and the result is a solution that is quick to deploy, low cost, high performance, and securely-featured.” -said Andrew Mendelsohn, Executive Vice President at Oracle Database.