Murad Moves Its High-End Beauty Business To Oracle Cloud
In the fast-paced beauty industry, consumers’ tastes change rapidly and their expectations rise constantly. So Murad LLC, a maker of high-end skin care products and a long-time user of Oracle on-premises technology, has moved to the Oracle Cloud to accelerate operations while lowering its capital costs.
In a recent episode on my Cloud Wars Live podcast series, Murad’s Rishabh Sinha, senior director of enterprise applications, described Murad’s cloud journey and offered insights into why the company—a division of Unilever—decided to move to the cloud, and the early-stage outcomes it has seen.
I’ve pulled out a few highlights from that conversation with Murad’s Sinha, and you can catch the entire conversation here.
Motivation for moving to the cloud.“Being in a beauty industry and being part of a big Unilever brand, there’s a lot of challenges on us to keep on delivering at a faster pace. And that requires for us to have systems and tools which can perform at a faster pace and a lower cost. So, one of the strategies for us is to try to move into a platform which can help us enable faster response, as well as try to figure out ways where we can reduce the cost....
“We have a direct-to-consumer business as well as a B2B side—and when you’re talking about direct to consumer, we get thousands of transactions per day. And in order to take all the transactions, send it to our warehouse to pick, packand invoice the customers on the same day, it’s a quite challenging job. So we needed a tool which can perform faster. And we also have a lot of transactions coming through our B2B retail partners, and they’re not small orders—they’re huge orders. And for us to process and pack, it’s something definitely we need. And with this migration, we were able to achieve that at a faster response.”
What business benefits have come out of the move to the cloud?“So, first and foremost was the cost saving—I think that was a big aspect for us to move. And so, then we don’t have to maintain our existing data center cost as well as the hardware costs.... Secondly, we were expecting some performance improvement, but we were not expecting the performance improvement would go up by 20, 30 percent. So, that was something—it was great to have that benefit.”
How did you manage the cutover to the cloud? “I think this is where we actually did it a little different. Instead of going to a traditional approach of a migration, we thought differently. We created our standby systems beforehand in the cloud environment. And then it was merely switching the node from the live to a standby. So, what we have done is we created all these migration up front. So, everything was done, even like two or three weeks before.... As soon as the migration was done, it was flip a switch that you can get your environment up and running. And that’s where it actually helped us to move this migration much more smoother.”
What’s next for Murad’s move to the cloud?“So, going from this process of where we did the infrastructure on cloud, I think the next process we were thinking was going into the phase of using databases on the servers where all the management of the database is being handled by Oracle. And then what, in my roadmap, I think the next step after that would be taking all the applications and supporting cloud. So, it’s a journey which we started in this direction. The first step has been successful. Nowthere are two more steps to go through, and which we are planning in subsequent years.”
Any unexpected benefits from this adventure?“We don’t have to buy every three years—and actually we saved some costs by selling our old hardware. There’s a big second-hand market for that.” [Light-hearted question: “So IT becomes a revenue-generator for the company?] “Yes, I think, yes. That has been a goal, and that’s definitely brought smiles to my CFO!”
How was Oracle as your cloud vendor?“We had been working with Oracle for a very long time, and we had been using Oracle products. And since this technology was on Oracle, it makes, actually, our life easier to go with Oracle, because this technology works very well with Oracle. And it’s more about moving our Oracle environment into the cloud. And one of the reasons why we picked Oracle is just because of the total, cohesive nature, and with the relationship with Oracle and the trust we have built with Oracle over the years. That actually helped us to move this partnership forward.”
You can catch the full conversation in podcast form here, and please check out all of our Cloud Wars Live podcast episodes about digital business, culture and innovation at CloudWarsLive.com.