Security leader HID transforms their back and front office using Oracle Cloud and saves 50 to 66% in OpEx
By migrating to Oracle Cloud and upgrading E-Business Suite and Agile PLM, HID created a modern, scalable IT platform and estimates a cost savings of 50 to 66% by eliminating data center costs.
“Now we’ve got a modern, scalable IT platform that supports our growth. And we’ve redeployed our data center employees to focus on revenue-generating activities.”
Business challenges
HID needed to make a digital transformation, taking them from a company that sold products in a perpetual licensing model to creating new, technology-driven digital products and subscription-based revenue streams.
They also wanted to remove the burden of capital expenditures and personnel resources to operate their data centers by moving front and back office systems to the cloud.
Why HID Global Chose Oracle
HID had initially planned to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS); it had dabbled in cloud by running DevOps for front office applications in AWS. However, for production workloads, HID required a cloud that would be well-suited to running enterprise applications and that provided the data protection, integrity, and control it needed as a security company.
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$1 billion growth target meant IT operations needed to be transformed
That’s when Oracle partner Centroid, a leader in Oracle consulting and managed services, stepped in to demonstrate the benefits and ease of migrating to Oracle Cloud.
Jim Brull, managing partner at Centroid, said, “We created a ‘pilot-to-production’ demo that showcased our turnkey three-phase accelerator to migrate to Oracle Cloud.” Centroid successfully demonstrated the rapid migration capabilities of its accelerator by moving HID’s E-Business Suite instance to Oracle Cloud in fewer than 12 hours. “The deal was done at that moment, and HID showed AWS the door. We then developed a comprehensive cloud migration strategy and roadmap using the information from our accelerator,” he said.
Centroid helped HID complete migration of the development, test, production, and QA environments for E-Business Suite, Agile PLM, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, Oracle SOA, Oracle Discoverer, Vertex, and several other non-Oracle applications on time and on budget. By migrating to Oracle Cloud and upgrading E-Business Suite from release 12.1.3 to 12.2.7 to support subscription billing, HID went from requiring four weeks to onboard a contract to just a few hours. Additionally, it moved and improved Agile PLM to help in the development of new, technology-driven digital products. It was important to integrate product development, cost management, contracts, and billing to ensure cost-effective and efficient operations end to end, from building the portfolio of products to selling it. HID is currently on track to meet its aggressive $1 billion additional revenue target.
HID’s Fitzgerald says, “Now, we’ve got a modern, scalable IT platform that supports our growth, and we’ve redeployed our data center employees to focus on revenue-generating activities. It’s a much more engaging work environment for them.”
HID has also realized significant cost savings, finding that the entire Oracle Cloud migration project was equivalent to just the data center colocation costs of floor space, bandwidth, and HVAC. The company estimates a savings of 50 to 66% in OpEx costs over four years by eliminating data center costs.
Finally, HID is seeing operational benefits. It has the agility to spin up or down application and database servers within minutes; previously it needed to procure new hardware. HID also leverages E-Business Suite Cloud Manager, which is only available on Oracle Cloud and provides automated tooling to make it easier to provision new environments.
Modern, scalable platform provides cost and operational benefits
As a multibillion-dollar company, HID Global had successfully and steadily grown over the years through direct, partner, and distribution sales. However, the executive leadership team set an aggressive growth target to add $1 billion to the top line. To accomplish this goal, HID needed to make a digital transformation, taking them from a company that sold products in a perpetual licensing model to creating new, technology-driven digital products and subscription-based revenue streams. In order to make this change, HID knew it had to transform its IT operations by moving to the cloud.
HID already had a large Oracle footprint. In the application layer, it uses Oracle E-Business Suite for finance, manufacturing, supply chain, and contracts. This mission-critical application needed to be upgraded to support billing via their new subscription model. HID also integrates E-Business Suite with Oracle Agile PLM for product lifecycle management, and Vertex for tax management. In the middleware layer it uses Oracle SOA and it has engineering applications that run on Oracle WebLogic. Oracle Database runs in the back end.
Most of these back-office applications and workloads had been running on VMware and HP servers in HID’s on-premises data center. According to Mike Fitzgerald, HID vice president of IT, “We didn’t want to focus on infrastructure and data centers any more. As a first step in our strategy, we wanted to remove the burden of capital expenditures and personnel resources to operate our data centers by moving our front and back office systems to the cloud.” It planned to reallocate the cost savings into product R&D and redeploy IT talent to help deliver innovative products to the market more quickly.
Results
- 50–66% savings in OpEx
- Reduced time to onboard a new contract from four weeks to hours
- Agility to spin up/down application and database servers in minutes