The NRMA leads the way for cloud-powered telephony with Oracle and VMware

The National Roads and Motorists’ Association (the NRMA) is Australia’s largest member-owned mutual organization, providing services and assistance to millions of citizens. A large part of the business is its 2.9 million-strong membership group, which signs up for services including roadside assistance. The nerve center at the NRMA is its call center, which helps customers in times of need, so system availability is critical. In the last 12 months, the center received over 1.4 million calls.

The organization focused on increasing the number of members the company serves, and needed a scalable telephony system that would grow with its membership base, ensuring continued excellence of service with no downtime or lagging. An added benefit of moving the telephony system to the cloud was to improve the company’s sustainability footprint with green systems.

The company also experienced difficulties with patching and upgrading the telephony system because the hardware was managed externally. When considering new options, the NRMA recognized the value of the cloud, because the group had migrated various critical systems to the cloud previously.

A key goal for the NRMA was a scalable, always available, geographically redundant platform. Moving to the cloud presented an opportunity to respond to more users at speed, improve the security of customer data, and improve flexibility and ease of use for staff.

The NRMA’s Avaya application was certified to run only on VMware, which meant any cloud solution needed to be run with VMware as well. The scalability, performance, and cost effectiveness of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) proved to be the best technical solution, while Oracle’s long relationship with the organization further solidified the decision. Oracle Cloud supported existing integrations and infrastructure, and offered more CPU and memory capabilities compared to other cloud providers.

Throughout the process, the NRMA would get support from Oracle’s Center of Excellence team, which would help to build out important capabilities and reduce downtime.

A live services team executed the migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Three virtual machine instances were moved to the new cloud-based system, and the production system, which was running on a legacy data center, was moved to the cloud. To complete the migration, Oracle gave the NRMA root access to the OCBs ESXi cluster. This helped manage patching and other requirements while supporting existing applications. OCVS also helped ensure integrations were not impacted throughout the process.

The NRMA’s in-house team took care of the bulk of the migration and implementation of the new system, with Oracle’s customer services team supporting as needed. The company no longer relies on third parties, but instead has control across its infrastructure and application work.

After implementation, the organization saved money on infrastructure management, saw greater security management, and improved experience of business applications for staff and users. In addition, the speed and efficiency for call center users was noticeable right away. Voice quality improved while volume also increased. The system can now serve up to 500 concurrent users.

Oracle Cloud Lift Services provided the setup for both the networking and the VMware cluster, which laid the foundation for the entire project. Also, Oracle’s Center of Excellence (CoE) team advised the organization on network design for the Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) cluster.