How others succeeded with OCI and IBM

This is the last article in a series created to help you make the most out of your Oracle enterprise applications with the help of IBM? and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The series explores strategies to combine business and technology skills to create new opportunities and modernize your mission critical applications from the inside out. The six articles highlight why migrating your on-premises Oracle applications to the cloud is a good business strategy in the current context and how IBM can help you accelerate your transition while keeping costs low. 

 This final article presents the stories of challenge and outcome of organizations which have chosen to enhance their existing Oracle investment with help from IBM. 

Previous articles discuss the benefits of OCI and why applications like PeopleSoft, eBusiness Suite or JD Edwards should run on OCI, as well as how to bring cloud into an on-premises data center. 

The value of a reliable partner for the future

Building a high-performance infrastructure is challenging, but organizations don’t need to face the risks of a cloud migration by themselves. In fact, a recent Gartner analysis revealed that by 2025, 85 percent of large organizations will have engaged external services providers to migrate applications to the cloud, up from 43 percent in 2019. 

IBM has been an Oracle partner for more than 30 years and a prominent managed services provider for over 20 years. These decades of experience have generated market-leading processes, knowledge and unparalleled insight into the design, build and deployment of cloud solutions. We’re committed to creating world-class solutions for organizations looking to upgrade their infrastructure with Oracle Cloud Solutions.

"Combining expert professional services from IBM and Oracle helps our joint clients improve performance and security, while significantly reducing costs to run their enterprise  applications. With Oracle’s Gen 2Cloud Infrastructure, implemented and managed by IBM Services, customers are able to shift their spend from maintenance and focus their own people on digitally-driven innovation."

?Aaron Millstone, Senior Vice President, Strategic Services & Partners, Oracle

The stories of taken opportunities

Delve into the stories of our clients and discover how Oracle and IBM helped enterprises around the globe transform cloud concerns into opportunities for growth and innovation. 

A win for government

Government entities face a plethora of challenges in relation to staying agile and responsive in a digital world. 

When such an entity experienced a performance decline from one of their Oracle hosting services, they sought guidance from IBM to fix the situation. The project included the migration of existing on-premises Oracle ERP applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as the management of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and applications. Under the guidance of experts, the IBM solution built a foundation for modernization. The solution enabled the government entity to benefit from the advantages of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure: greater reliability, resilience, flexibility, lower TCO. 

By analyzing the specific challenges of the client, our team of experts created an ideal mix of components including cloud service provider agreements, cloud architecture, cloud migration, testing and hosting managed services. This integrated and highly customized solution was aimed at helping the government entity to remediate their situation as smoothly and quickly as possible. The migration to OCI took seven months to execute successfully and is being followed by 63 months of support in the new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, as well as a renewal of the Application Management Service for another 69 months.

Bringing cloud to the financial sector 

Emerging technologies have been transformative across industries, but even more so for the financial sector.  

One client was looking to simplify the lending process and deliver responsive and personalized services to their clients. On their modernization journey, the client engaged IBM to automate and digitize its financial processes. IBM Services proposed a digital transformation of the bank’s finance systems based on a suite of Oracle cloud-service solutions: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, BI Publisher, Oracle PBCS, Oracle Developer Cloud Service, Oracle EPM Cloud, Oracle Java Cloud Service, Oracle Financials Cloud, ERP Cloud. 

The Oracle deployment delivered by IBM Services started the dawn of a new era for the financial organization. Now the bank is more equipped than ever to understand and quickly react to its clients’ individual needs. The solutions implemented and managed by IBM cut 7 days from monthly closing, enabling staff to focus on improving customer service. The solution also saved weeks on regulatory and SEC reporting and sped up external audits by up to 10% – translating into thousands of dollars less in auditor fees every year.

Another financial institution was interested in modernizing their existing Oracle ERP systems by moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, PaaS, and SaaS. The tailor-made solution included a mix of components aimed at creating simplicity and transparency across processes while keeping costs down. 

The experts assigned to this project successfully integrated the organization’ system with cloud middleware solutions, using automation to enhance the control environment and reduce complexities and risk. Thanks to the expansion of Analytics capabilities, financial data is more transparent and more easily accessible, while accounting and reporting are more consistent and efficient. The solution implemented by IBM experts resolves the organization’s major challenges and positions it for future growth in an uncertain future. 

 Cloud for hospitality

A multi-national hospitality and leisure company with multiple lines of business sought IBM for help with upgrading their core Oracle eBusiness Suite system to a newer version in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The upgrade was challenging because the operating environment was so complex and the change impacted operations across finance, manufacturing, supply chain and planning, as well as several new and on-going projects. 

The project involved a “lift and shift” approach to migrating Oracle EBS on OCI. With this type of approach, IBM worked with Oracle Bare metal (EE Extreme Performance) to reduce the time needed for migration and upgrade. The solutions for the client included migrating Oracle ERP DB server from AIX to Linux, upgrading Database to 12.1.0.2 in OCI (Linux) and upgrading application to 12.2.7 in OCI. The migration provided the organization with a lower total cost of ownership and significantly improved the user experience. 

Modernizing industries with cloud

A diversified mining company, active in gold, base metals, mining and infrastructure industry engaged IBM to help create an agile, secure and modern IT infrastructure that is geared to utilize the latest emerging technologies like AI.

Our team of experts moved the Oracle applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in country for better scalability, performance and security. The project included two phases: the first one included the migration of Oracle eBS and BI, and the following stage continued with the migration of Hyperion and SOA middleware. 

The benefits of the modernization are quantifiable and include improved application management, reduced costs for maintenance and operations, enhanced security and ERP scalability during peak loads. 

How to successfully accelerate your journey to Oracle Cloud

 Hear more stories from clients who trust Oracle Cloud Infrastructure for their mission-critical business apps by attending the webinar on Thursday, December 17, 2020, 11:00 AM EST. Discover how to improve performance and security, while reducing costs for your enterprise and performance-intensive applications with help from Oracle and IBM Services. Chacko Thomas, (Partner, IBM Oracle Global Sales & Offerings Leader) together with Lauren Baker (Oracle Marketing & Comms Global Business Services), Steven Dubbs (Global Business Development for IBM Services for Managed Applications) and Aaron Millstone (Senior Vice President, Strategic Services and Partners, Oracle) are going to discuss what’s possible and how to get there. You can join the event here

 The event is concluding a series of webinars discussing why OCI represents the best option for moving Oracle apps and workloads and how IBM can implement and manage every aspect of your migration to Oracle cloud. You can register for the series here.

 Comment below and let me know what’s your migration story or if you’re still pondering the implications of cloud modernization. 

Maybe you’d rather have a one-on-one conversation instead. No problem. Just send me a LinkedIn message, and I’d be happy to chat with you.

Stay well.