Atlantic Lottery moves ERP to OCI to support digital growth and lower its costs
After Deloitte helped it move to OCI, the lottery saved more than C$6 million and enhanced its security.
“Oracle Cloud provided the scalability and flexibility we needed while also being more stable and secure.”
Business challenges
In 2012, when Canada-based Atlantic Lottery implemented its first ERP system, it offered products such as Lottery, Scratch & Win, and Video Lottery. Over the years it expanded product lines to include online and digital games. As a result of this significant digital expansion, Atlantic Lottery’s data grew at such a fast pace that its on-premises data center, running Oracle E-Business Suite and a custom data warehouse, couldn’t keep up with the company’s data and reporting needs. Workloads were taking longer to run, and costs were rising.
In 2018, while preparing to launch its iCasino offering, Atlantic Lottery decided that the on-premises platform wouldn’t be able to support the business’s analytical needs. The company needed a stable, secure, and scalable platform to meet future growth goals.
Where it used to take us four months to spin up a new environment, it now takes less than a day.
Why Atlantic Lottery chose Oracle
After consulting with Deloitte and reviewing a wide variety of options, Atlantic Lottery selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to run its Oracle E-Business Suite ERP applications and related databases. The move to OCI helped Atlantic Lottery cut operating costs, increase infrastructure scalability, and enhance security.
Since this was Atlantic Lottery’s first migration to a cloud platform, it looked to Deloitte to help plan, secure stakeholder buy-in, share knowledge, and migrate the on-premises applications and workloads to OCI.
Moving ERP to run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was Atlantic Lottery’s first cloud migration.
Results
Moving to OCI gave Atlantic Lottery leaders confidence that the systems could grow and scale along with the business. The company’s ERP and database migration achieved benefits in three areas: financial, performance and flexibility, and security.
First, Atlantic Lottery saved between C$6 million and C$7 million by migrating its on-premises environment to the cloud—a savings that exceeded expectations. “We were anticipating a reduction in costs of around C$5 million,” says Megan Calvert, director of development and operations.
Second, the move to OCI improved performance and flexibility, providing the ability to spin up a new environment to support a new initiative in a matter of days, compared to the four or five months the previous on-premises environment required.
Atlantic Lottery also benefited from enhanced security with Oracle Cloud, including effective training of security staff. “One of our biggest lessons learned on the project was to bring in our security team early and ensure that they have the skills and knowledge available to support us long-term,” Calvert says.
Partners
Deloitte helped Atlantic Lottery evaluate cloud options, choose a strategy, and implement it. “The benefit to partnering with Deloitte is that they have such a large breadth of skill sets and people,” Calvert says. “When we would run into a roadblock, Deloitte would pull someone in who was either a subject matter expert in that particular area or had actual experience implementing the same type of project. And they would bring them in to help us through those roadblocks.”
About the customer
Founded in 1976, Atlantic Lottery provides government-regulated lottery products in Atlantic Canada. Products include draw games, online bingo, breakopen tickets, sports wagering, and games in social settings and on the internet. Atlantic Lottery returns 100% of profits to the four provincial shareholders—New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador—to fund hospitals, schools, roads, arenas, social programs, and other services.