Migrating Oracle E-Business Suite to Amazon Web Services (AWS): Financial Software Company Increases Performance and Scale to Navigate Tax Season

This global business and financial software company with over 10,000 employees put a a stake in the ground, deciding to consolidate all infrastructure on AWS, making the choice of solution for this project obvious. They wanted to be able to innovate at lightning-fast speed in order to provide the best possible service to their customers.

This global business and financial software company with over 10,000 employees operates with a customer-first, purpose-driven approach, while increasing developer productivity and improving the day-to-day experience of their engineers via the speed of innovation. While delving deep to achieve these goals, the company realized that the best way to do so was to create a scalable infrastructure that could be made available quickly. This led to a journey of building a cloud infrastructure.

As an organization they had put a stake in the ground, deciding to consolidate all infrastructure on AWS, making the choice of solution for this project obvious. They wanted to be able to innovate at lightning-fast speed in order to provide the best possible service to their customers. By moving to AWS, they could do so by reducing time for infrastructure setup and scaling.

Introduction

Having completed the migration to AWS for most of their custom and business critical applications, Oracle E-Business Suite (Oracle EBS) was the last remaining piece of their cloud puzzle. As the critical back-end application for the company, Oracle EBS had been used to support key business processes, including:

  • P&L management
  • Billing platform software
  • Expenses – source to procure/procure to pay
  • Financial hub

Not only did the new cloud-based system have to support these four pillars of business processes, but it also needed to meet or exceed requirements for increased reliability and scalability, as demand for the company’s accounting and tax management software packages experience drastic seasonal shifts.

With the cloud destination decided and goals in place, all that remained was identifying the right organization who could act more like an in-house partner, to guide and provide technical expertise and support for the migration of the business critical Oracle EBS data. Further, due to the important role of the application toward overall business operations, the company knew the high complexity of the migration required an experienced strategic specialist – who could ensure that they’d have high performance and availability, in line with or exceeding that of their existing solution – while sticking to a strict timeline. Enter, Apps Associates.

The Final Piece to the AWS Puzzle

As a dedicated AWS Premier Consulting Partner and member of the AWS Partner Network (APN), Apps Associates has 10 years of experience in managing complex workloads on AWS. With experts that have developed a deep technical knowledge of the platform, Apps is able to meet the individual needs of each of their clients. This particular migration of Oracle EBS to AWS was no different and at the recommendation of the company’s AWS account manager, Apps became the clear choice. Apps’ experience, processes and tools were what this organization needed in order to plan and successfully execute the final stage of their transition. With additional endorsements from AWS, themselves backing Apps Associates, they knew they would not only find the right expertise and skill needed, but a true partner to lead the project.

Apps Associates: Trusted AWS Partner

With Apps at the helm, providing guidance and support to the company’s internal team, the migration was broken down into 5 phases:

  1. Apps-led migration to AWS.
  2. Boundary application integration testing.
  3. Functional testing of the new environment.
  4. SOX compliance testing.
  5. Performance testing of the new environment.

Structuring the project in this way allowed the enterprise to begin testing the application as a Proof of Concept in order to ensure metrics from the new AWS environment equaled or exceeded results seen on the existing Oracle Exadata RAC hosting platform. Additionally, in testing and creating a development environment after each stage, both Apps experts and company team members were able to ensure that performance (which supports over 2 million transactions a day at peak volume) was not being impacted by the data move to AWS.

The proactive phased approach and structure to the project also helped to keep the migration on track in order to meet their fast-approaching busy season. By not placing all of the testing until the end phase, Apps was able to remain nimble and flexible, avoiding any challenges that could have derailed the hard go-live, which would have left the financial software company caught in the middle of a platform transition during their busiest time of year.

The Final Move to AWS

With the migration of the company’s Oracle EBS data and application environment complete, they are equipped to take on their first peak season fully supported by their AWS hosting environment. With the move to the cloud poised to realize an estimated cost savings of $1.2 – $1.5M throughout their busy season alone – an enormous ROI that cements their decision and sets the company up for long-term success for years to come.

In addition, the move to AWS resulted in a more simplified architecture, which was needed in order to adequately support the company’s SLAs and performance requirements. This easier-to-manage platform has led to increased flexibility to scale, behind increased year-over-year growth and as demand ebbs and flows for the company’s tax management software with the time of year. Equipped with faster provisioning capabilities and native tie-ins to the larger AWS ecosystem, they were also able to successfully achieve migration to AWS.

As a company that is dedicated to ensuring both their customers and internal personnel have the best experience possible, it was important that their partner for this project echoed that commitment, which Apps did in spades. Not only did Apps lead a successful migration in a remarkably short time period, but they encouraged everyone to work together as a single team towards a single goal – so the difference between internal and external teams was never felt.

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About Apps Associates

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