TAQA boosts efficiencies with Oracle Cloud and reduces downtime by 80%
The utility company gains 30% more performance and full regulatory compliance after lifting Oracle E-Business Suite onto Oracle Cloud.
“As a global company, we partnered with Oracle because of the integrated cloud approach that enhances our current operations and supports our business needs for the future.”
Business challenges
Abu Dhabi National Energy Company (TAQA) is a diversified utilities and energy group headquartered in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, and is one of the largest companies listed on the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange.
With multiple vertically integrated operating units and US$49 billion in assets, TAQA runs Oracle E-Business Suite for its critical business processes. For more than 10 years, the company outsourced management of the application to Oracle Managed Cloud Services.
Then in 2020, the utility adopted a multicloud strategy to address key challenges, including the need to improve system availability and reduce outages, enhance security compliance requirements, and implement a disaster recovery site for Oracle E-Business Suite.
Oracle Advanced Customer Services offsets a lot of the workload and worries to ensure my system is protected, secured, properly backed up, and seamlessly running, allowing us to focus on the business.
Why TAQA chose Oracle
TAQA has been an Oracle Database, Oracle Middleware, and Oracle applications customer since its inception in 2005. In choosing a cloud provider for critical applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, it stayed with the technology provider it knew best.
The utility decided to migrate Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), in line with its hybrid multicloud strategy
“Oracle technology combined with Oracle Advanced Customer Services means peace of mind. They truly simplify a continuously complex IT landscape, and Advanced Customer Service knows our Oracle EBS environment like nobody else. It’s as good as it gets,” says Antoine Kamar, vice president of IT operations.
Porting Oracle E-Business Suite to OCI for greater performance and automated administration is part of the company’s strategy of deploying multiple cloud environments across the organization, including Oracle, Azure, and UAE-based G42 for AI-powered cloud computing.
Results
The move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Compute gave TAQA an immediate 30% performance improvement, as Oracle Enterprise Database Service boosted availability and scalability to oil and gas users connected to Oracle and non-Oracle systems across continents.
Downtime, the company’s most critical KPI, dropped by 80% after migration, thanks to OCI Compute’s flexible capacity management and an application SLA of 99.95% uptime.
TAQA uses Oracle E-Business Suite’s integrated SOA Gateway to link with its cloud procurement system and other secure and encrypted transfer protocols to connect the company’s on-premises treasury management solution.
Compliance has been another key success factor, as the organization previously did not have the data segregation framework essential to internal and external audits. With OCI’s adherence to global data protection regulations, TAQA now achieves SOC 1 and SOC 2 acceptance faster, demonstrating that non-production systems are properly tested and approved before being promoted to the production environment.
In terms of resilience, OCI has succeeded in meeting the company’s Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Target Objective (RTO) targets. Recovery time now stands at two hours instead of days or even weeks in the old environment, thanks to OCI’s hot backup and disaster recovery capabilities. The time to run patching dropped from 4 hours to just 30 minutes.
Back-end administration, now handled by OCI, has shrunk by 30%, as TAQA’s IT teams no longer administer technical matters such as Linux or Oracle patching, updates, upgrades, or the usual database management routines. The team reports an improved work-life balance as back-end processes are automated and weekend emergencies are a thing of the past.
On the analytics front, TAQA extracts a nightly load from OCI into its data warehouse for processing in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, the energy company’s standard platform for creating analytics dashboards and KPIs.
In the near term, the energy company will be moving production and disaster recovery environments to the newly opened Oracle Cloud regions in Abu Dhabi and Dubai for stronger business continuity.
Partners
Oracle Advanced Customer Services (ACS), which formerly supported TAQA’s Oracle EBS as a managed service, carried out the migration and upgrade to OCI Compute. Over the past decade and into the new implementation, ACS helped TAQA leverage a combination of multiple cloud and on-premises environments, providing testing and validation, connectivity checking, and validating integrations between the cloud and on-premises solutions.
About the customer
TAQA is one of the largest publicly listed companies in the UAE by market capitalization. As a fully integrated utilities company, it has a diversified portfolio of operations spanning 11 countries across power and water generation, transmission and distribution, as well as upstream and midstream oil and gas operations.