Simplifying AWS System Migration with Apps Associates

As a privately owned, multi-brand dining, hospitality, entertainment and gaming corporation, this company owns and operates more than 600 restaurants, hotels, casinos, and entertainment destinations in 35 states and the District of Columbia. In addition to its American market, the company also has a rapidly expanding global footprint, recently establishing a presence in China and southeast Asia.  In early 2021, a portion of the organization went public.

To maintain consistency and interoperability across its ecosystems of brands, partners, and vendors, the company has traditionally relied on an overarching system infrastructure to centralize core processes, such as weekly payroll to over 50,000 employees. The solution, however, showed limitations that come with running an on-prem IBM AIX environment—something the company began to feel more and more as they planned for even greater global expansion. These limitations coupled with the solution’s significant hardware investment and manual patch updates led the company to look for a cloud-based solution that would eliminate these hurdles. After meeting with top cloud vendors, executive leadership ultimately turned to Linux on AWS—a solution that would reduce off-site patch management and provide additional support for recovery.

Prior to the migration, the company ran on Oracle EBS 12.2.7 with the Database 12.1.0.2 and a DB size of 4.5TB. When the company team made the decision to migrate to the cloud, it needed to be confident that no matter the solution they implemented, their partner would not only be able to migrate the systems, but play a leading role in the necessary change management required to educate and support internal staff post migration. As a tenured partner of record with both AWS and the company itself, Apps Associates fit the bill when it came time to migrate the operating system from AIX to Linux.

As a valued partner, Apps Associates not only had the historical knowledge of the company’s systems and preferences, but a proven track record of successfully migrating more than 350+ other customer workloads to AWS—providing unmatched technical support, solid project management and strong strategic guidance for the betterment of the business.

While the company had both the solution and partner determined, multiple factors caused the evaluation process to last approximately seven months prior to the actual system migration taking place. First, the project was extended due to an internal client network issue that had to be resolved before Apps could step in and begin the migration. Once resolved, the company again chose to extend the project in response to the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, which led to a 4 month pause on all project activity. Once these hurdles were mitigated and new safety measures were implemented to combat the pandemic, which heavily impacted the leading hospitality company, the migration was finally able to move forward in September 2020.

With safety workarounds in place, Apps took the lead in developing a project roadmap and systems migration plan to help transition the company to AWS. Apps experts worked to establish frequent and transparent communication and collaboration between internal employees and external team members. Additionally, given the personnel constraints caused by the pandemic, Apps further stepped into the role of Oracle technical support, ensuring that any pre-migration systems could still be managed, and core processes could be maintained.

Since completion of the migration, the company’s IT leadership team has begun to realize immediate benefits of their shift to AWS, including faster patching and updating. It has also seen a dramatically lower total CPU usage, which has been reduced by nearly a third, from 90% to 65%.

Following the project’s success, the company has enlisted Apps to continue to serve in a core support and advisory capacity, assisting with change management training of company staff on the newly optimized system practices and other long-term needs.