Alliance Data saves US$1 million by migrating to OCI

• $1M in overall savings in first year
• Half the cost to run Hyperion versus with competing cloud
• Exceptional support for Oracle applications
• Unmatched database performance with Exadata
• Consolidated three on-premises Exadata Quarter racks to two in the cloud
• Mission-critical systems addressing compliance needs in the public cloud including SOC 1 and SOC 2

 

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Unparalleled support for Oracle Applications and Exadata

Alliance Data Systems has been a long-time Oracle customer. They leverage Oracle PeopleSoft to manage human resources for all 20,000 employees as well as the company’s financials.

Oracle also enables Alliance Data Systems critical insight into the future with Oracle Hyperion Planning and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) for forecasting, planning and reporting. These applications, as well as their development environments, are trusted to run on Exadata; enabling maximum uptime and availability. They needed to keep running these mission-critical systems, but they wanted to do it in the cloud.

Alliance Data Systems had considered multiple cloud vendors, including Amazon Web Services (AWS). They compared each vendor’s offerings, cost, and the ability to keep their enterprise systems secure and available. However, they also knew from experience that their business had greatly benefited from the performance, scalability, and reliability of their Exadata database platform, and leaving that platform was risky and could affect the service they deliver to their customers.

In the end, Alliance Data Systems decided that migrating to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was the best path forward. Their experience had proven time and time again that their database portfolio runs best on Exadata, and only Oracle Cloud Infrastructure offered them the same Exadata platform.

“Oracle and LTI (Larsen & Toubro Infotech) were with us every step of the way during the migration.” said Suresh Tripathi, Director of IT, Software Engineering at Alliance Data Systems. “Originally, we were only going to migrate PeopleSoft, but we later decided to move all our Oracle Applications. We had many sessions with Oracle to look at each application and compared all different deployment options. This is the best support I’ve ever seen.”

Seamless transition to gain cloud agility and scalability

Over the course of 21 weeks, the Oracle team then worked closely with Alliance Data Systems and partner LTI to design and execute a migration plan that would ensure zero business disruption within a stringent timeline. LTI leveraged a toolkit built by its in-house, dedicated Oracle Innovation and Solution Center (OISC) to help ensure an error-free migration. Their tools reduced turnaround time by 40%, through auto-provisioning of application environments, and trimmed the time to cloud readiness by 60% without impacting business operations.

All told, 30 databases and 25 Terabytes of critical financial and HR data from three quarter racks of Exadata on-premises were transferred quickly and securely to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The team utilized a 1GB-FastConnect via Megaport and private cloud networks accessible only to Alliance Data Systems. They also migrated PeopleSoft, Hyperion, OBIEE, and their respective development environments. Alliance Data Systems now runs six environments for PeopleSoft – development, Q/A, user acceptance testing, disaster recovery, production, and certification – all in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Since moving to the cloud, Alliance Data Systems can seamlessly add resources to support month-end reporting and heavy forecasting and planning seasons; on demand and when they need them. With Oracle’s Universal Credit Model, they also have the flexibility to purchase the right compute resources that they need for each workload; Bare Metal Dense IO shapes for certain forecasting and planning workloads, and Virtual Machine Standard shapes for business intelligence needs.

In addition to agility and scalability benefits, Alliance Data Systems expects significant cost benefits. When they were comparing clouds, the cost to run Hyperion on AWS was nearly double what it would cost on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The migration to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also allowed Alliance Data Systems to consolidate their three on-premises Exadata quarter racks down to two, further adding to the cost savings. Overall, they expect to save around $1M in overall costs in just the first year of deployment.

LTI is a global technology consulting and digital solutions Company helping more than 300 clients succeed in a converging world.