Case Study: Canton of Appenzell‑Innerrhoden achieves modernized civic services and boosted performance with Oracle Database Appliance

Canton of Appenzell-Innerrhoden Modernizes Civic Service with Engineered Systems

The Canton of Appenzell‑Innerrhoden, Switzerland’s smallest canton, provides many citizen services across sectors like finance, healthcare, education and tourism. Its IT team ran 12 database applications on two aging Windows servers with Oracle Database 11g, and found performance, reliability and scalability no longer met growing demands; with only six IT staff, the canton needed a stable, easy‑to‑manage, transparently licensed solution to reduce downtime, maintenance and total cost of ownership.

The canton deployed three Oracle Database Appliance X6‑2 systems and upgraded to Oracle Database 12c—using one appliance for testing and two for high availability across redundant datacenters. The change delivered twice‑as‑fast complex queries (for example monthly tax calculations), error‑free operation since go‑live, 15‑minute datacenter failover capability, a four‑day implementation and migration, update windows shortened from up to 8 hours to 30 minutes, and reduced licensing costs through capacity‑on‑demand, resulting in more reliable citizen services and lower IT overhead.