Case Study: City of Lakeland achieves $2.5M in infrastructure savings and 6x faster billing with Oracle Exadata

City of Lakeland Saves an Estimated US$2.5 Million Data in Infrastructure Costs Over Five Years While Gaining Customer Satisfaction and Staff Productivity

The City of Lakeland, a municipal government in Polk County, Florida serving over 97,000 residents and operating utilities for more than 100,000 electric and 52,000 water accounts, needed to improve the performance and scalability of its utility billing and other critical applications. Key challenges included slow transaction response and overnight billing runs, lengthy batch processing windows, rising IT and licensing costs, and the need for high availability to support an online e‑services portal.

Lakeland deployed Oracle Exadata and Oracle Enterprise Manager, consolidated eight databases onto a single platform, and implemented unified e‑services and ongoing Oracle support services. The modernization cut total cost of ownership by an estimated $2.5 million over five years (plus $314,418 from portal consolidation), made overnight electric billing runs six times faster, reduced batch windows from 5–7 hours to under one hour, lowered CPU usage dramatically, sped pension and report processing, and improved staff productivity and customer satisfaction.

City of Lakeland

Laz Martinez

Systems and Programming Manager