Along with Baguio City’s smart city vision, the summer capital’s tourism department has been strengthening the digitalization program even before the pandemic hit. Now, the city gradually reopens, it taps software firm Oracle Cloud (Philippines) to help manage interstate visitor traffic application process called Baguio Visitors Information & Travel Assistance (VISITA).

This is also the local government’s response to the ongoing pandemic. The online registration will not only enable it to monitor visitor’s data but also aid the city in contact tracing should for cases of COVID-19.

The Baguio VISITA application, an integrated visitor management system, runs on Oracle Cloud Native Services which include Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes, an Oracle-managed container orchestration service that can reduce the time and cost to build modern cloud-native applications.

PH cement manufacturer adopts Oracle Cloud ERP to automate operations

Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse features no-code tools

“Smart cities need to find ways to modernize the traditional building blocks of the city from clean water to safe roads, adequate power,” said Mina Lim, country managing director of Oracle Philippines. “And of course, they also need to upgrade their digital capabilities.”

Cost savings

Pre-pandemic, Baguio City attracts hundreds of thousands of tourists during peak months. During the lockdowns when borders were closed, the number of visitors dwindled significantly. Now that the vaccinations are in place and people are learning to live in the middle of a global health pandemic, Baguio City is expecting more visitors in the coming months, especially during the cool climate months.

“The application was developed and deployed in a very short span of time, I would say in less than two weeks,” said Alec Mapalo, divison head, City Tourism and Special Events Office, City of Baguio.

The deployment of Oracle Cloud has also delivered 55% cost savings as compared to running the system on-premises.

Built-in security

To add to the built-in security of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Baguio City added Oracle Cloud Guard, which detects misconfigured resources and insecure activity so they can be triaged and resolved. Also, Oracle Web Application Firewall, which combines threat intelligence with consistent rule enforcement, has been implemented to protect the application from malicious and unwanted internet traffic.

“We selected Oracle Cloud for the Baguio VISITA program due to its enterprise-grade performance, rapid scalability, and simplicity of integration which enabled the system to go live in just one week,” Mapalo said. Since moving to the cloud, we have seen significant cost savings as compared to previously.”