WorkForce Software moves from Azure to Oracle Cloud, ups performance 30%

While the evidence connecting a full moon with strange behavior on earth is more anecdotal than factual, flight attendants, emergency room workers, and first responders in various US locations have managed to negotiate a celestial form of hazard pay when they work under this lunar phase.

Managing such unique work conditions is the sweet spot of Livonia, Michigan-based WorkForce Software, whose popular software adapts to each organization’s unique pay rules, labor regulations, HR policies, schedules, and employee self-service needs. Its scores of customers include Air Canada, ATB Financial, ATS Automation, Goodwill, Ontario’s London Hydro, Oregon State University, Rite Aid, and Tenet Health.

In 2019, WorkForce Software carefully evaluated the potential of moving the development, testing, disaster recovery, and production of its cloud software—which at the time ran on a combination of regional colocation facilities and Microsoft Azure—into a single cloud environment. The company’s main goals: improve application performance, reliability, and scalability, as well as deliver the latest updates automatically to users worldwide.

“The architecture most public cloud providers offer does not account for these requirements,” says John Williams, WorkForce Software chief technology officer. “And those that do usually come at a significant price premium.”

WorkForce Software began to look for an alternative public cloud provider when Microsoft Azure fell short of delivering adequate performance for WorkForce’s most data-intensive applications.

WorkForce’s evaluation of AWS and Google Cloud didn’t meet its stringent needs, so the company chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, whose more efficient architecture delivers superior performance and economics. WorkForce also liked Oracle’s consistent global pricing model and its first-rate support.

WorkForce Software estimates that the combination of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure’s low-latency network and the processing speed of the Oracle Exadata database service is delivering a 30% performance improvement compared with its previous setup, while requiring no changes to its core application. That performance improvement has “solidified confidence among our customers that we are able to scale as their requirements scale,” says WorkForce Chief Technology Officer John Williams.

The company’s original plan to shift from colocation facilities to a pure cloud offering had been blocked by the significant cost increase, due to the premium systems required for acceptable performance. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was the first offering WorkForce Software evaluated that delivered superior performance at a significantly lower total cost.

A secondary benefit is Oracle’s consistent pricing structure across regions. Oracle’s simple rate structures eliminate the cost surprises associated with hard-to-estimate usage elements such as data egress and storage performance. Oracle also charges the same rates for all regions, so going global on Oracle Cloud means no hidden cost variances.

Williams also cites Oracle’s superior technical and executive support. “It’s like none other in the industry, providing a true partnership, where Oracle’s success criteria are directly mapped to our success,” he says.

WorkForce Software notes that Oracle is expanding its data center footprint—from 4 cloud regions in 2018 to 24 in 2020, with plans to expand to 36 regions in 2021. That expansion will allow WorkForce to accelerate the delivery of its cloud software into new regions and forego costly capital expenditures on aging hardware in its colocation facilities, the company says.