Prophecy taps Oracle Cloud VMware Solution and extends its cloud-powered success

Prophecy International is a software development company listed on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX). Its software products include Snare and eMite. Snare is a logging solution that pairs with any Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) System or Security Analytics platform and is trusted by public and private sector organizations globally to meet evolving log management needs, including Zero Trust. eMite is a global contact center analytics solution that combines advanced analytics, data correlation, KPI management, and threshold alerting in a single product. The result is actionable insights from real-time and historical data, which improves contact center efficiency, performance, and customer experience.

Mass migration to the cloud is a growth opportunity for Prophecy and its SaaS model. As customers migrate their contact center infrastructure to the cloud, they pull data from multiple applications and systems. Prophecy is the glue that brings data together, enabling users to deliver better customer experiences.

A challenge for Prophecy, and one restricting its growth, was internal hardware nearing end of life. The company needed a modern infrastructure, including changing its VMware farm and updating legacy tape backup and archival processes.

It wanted to future-proof its products, including ensuring ongoing scalability in line with business growth and an expanding team.

The company selected Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS) to migrate its entire VMware environment to the cloud, thanks to an already strong relationship between Oracle and VMware.

OCVS is a fully integrated platform on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) in a VMware environment. It allowed Prophecy to continue using existing experiences while better utilizing technology aligned to its needs. OCVS was optimized to run Prophecy’s VMware farm in the cloud with increased scalability, flexible on-demand disaster recovery plans, and seamless integration with out-of-the-box archival products.

The company could run workloads in a VMware environment using OCI, reducing the need for specific customizations to applications and cost. OCVS also gave Prophecy full control of its VMware stack​ and continuity of existing processes and skills. It was also more advanced than the company’s former vSphere Standard Edition, enabling ongoing growth.

Prophecy is decommissioning its data center, reducing real estate costs and manual operational work. On-demand disaster recovery made it an overall low-cost option while also accommodating future growth.

The new solution, built with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Oracle Cloud VMware Solution, improved backup speeds by a factor of 10-12 times the speed over the internal systems. This is now measured in minutes versus hours.

It has also substantially reduced Prophecy’s backup windows. This is helping redefine Prophecy’s IT DR Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) time, allowing it to complete more backups, more often, reducing the potential of data loss. Restore speeds are also 10 to 15 times faster now, helping reduce downtime when recovering a system or performing test system recoveries.

Tech agility and the ability to quickly ship to market also increased, with the team able to scale and provision workloads rapidly. The new OCI solution also reduced risks, including data loss with cold disaster recovery and geolocation data replication. Recovery time and point objectives require fewer than 12 hours.

Many disk speed capabilities measured are up to 16 times faster with the OCVS environment, compared to on-premises. Some application compile times have dropped by 50%, providing faster turnaround for development teams to help with other productivity enhancements. In addition, the team has 50% to 60% more storage with the new solution versus on-premises to allow for natural system growth. Prophecy is decommissioning its physical data center, saving significant costs.

From a DevOps perspective, teams can fail fast because wait times are halved. This leads to quicker problem remediation and innovations. Having greater productivity for the dev teams is a key driver in maintaining internal development systems.

Additionally, “We can easily find, visualize, and analyze our data using OCI Search with OpenSearch as a key component of our eMite solution,“ says CISO Steve Challans. “The fully managed, open source search engine has proven to be not only scalable but also cost-effective, saving us over 50% compared to alternatives. Moreover, it is up to 20% faster than other solutions. Our collaboration with the OCI OpenSearch team has been outstanding. We're excited for the upcoming OpenSearch features, especially the semantic search to accelerate OCI Generative AI service integration.“

From here, Prophecy plans to increase cloud scale and capacity, and extend cloud flexibility with data proximity. It can use VMware-based applications, which can be moved across Oracle Cloud Infrastructure without the need for manual porting, refactoring code, or resolving configuration differences. It also means on-premises workloads can be migrated to OCI in hours or days rather than months or years.

The solution also runs in all 37 of Oracle’s global cloud regions, offering data proximity, optimal performance, and data residency compliance.

Oracle Cloud Lift Services provided extensive support for migration and setup. It was included at no additional cost to Prophecy. The business was able to draw on experts to aid with the transition and adoption of the VMware solution and address any challenges in real time.