Maritz improves performance by 10X moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Aging hardware was overburdening IT staff

On-premises applications were running on aging nine years old hardware that was struggling to keep up with the ever-growing workloads

What’s more, the infrastructure had grown so complicated that executing failovers for disaster recovery (DR) was now overly cumbersome, often taking 72 hours to complete a failover

Enterprise Application Services team faced ongoing planning and maintenance issues

Limited staff was losing the skillset to maintain the database and Solaris operating system that supported the legacy environment

Hunsaker’s team did consider other cloud providers, but Maritz has been a long-time E-Business Suite customer, having relied on it for 29 years. They had upgraded recently to release 12.2.5 and believed in maintaining it as a system of record. Therefore, they knew that moving E-Business Suite to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure would be the best decision in the long term in terms of performance and future supportability.

 

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Aging hardware was overburdening IT staff

Maritz’s business units leveraged over 27 applications on-premises, including Oracle E-Business Suite, Vertex, Kofax MarkView for AP and custom applications, running on Oracle WebLogic Middleware and Oracle Database to manage enterprise resource planning functions such as finance, accounting, inventory, procurement and HR.

The challenge Maritz had was that these on-premises applications supported critical back-office operations, but they were running on aging Sun Microsystems hardware. The hardware was over nine years old, and as the business grew, it struggled to keep up with the ever-growing workloads. What’s more, the infrastructure had grown so complicated that executing failovers for disaster recovery (DR) was now overly cumbersome, often taking 72 hours to complete a failover.

In addition, the Enterprise Application Services team that managed these applications faced ongoing planning and maintenance issues. With on-premises hardware, it was often difficult to do proper capacity planning for large projects or peak seasons, which led to limited ability to control infrastructure costs. What’s more, their already limited staff was quickly losing the skillset to maintain the database and Solaris operating system that supported the legacy environment since key personnel with the required expertise had announced their retirement.

Ron Hunsaker, Vice President of the Enterprise Application Services team at Maritz, made the strategic decision to move to the cloud to alleviate the burden on the IT staff, improve performance, streamline DR, and better manage infrastructure costs through an OPEX model. By transitioning to PaaS and IaaS, they would enable database administrators to focus on more customer-facing and revenue-generating efforts while development staff would be able to concentrate on more value-added projects rather than on keeping the lights on.

Hunsaker’s team did consider other cloud providers, but Maritz has been a long-time E-Business Suite customer, having relied on it for 29 years. They had upgraded recently to release 12.2.5 and believed in maintaining it as a system of record. Therefore, they knew that moving E-Business Suite to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure would be the best decision in the long term in terms of performance and future supportability.

Moving to Oracle Cloud led to improved performance and DR

Within a nine-month period, Maritz and their implementation partner Keste migrated sandbox, dev/test, production and disaster recovery environments for E-Business Suite and an additional 26+ applications running on an Oracle back end to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “I can’t say enough about how smoothly the migration went.” said Hunsaker about the transition. “We have a warehouse that we fulfil out of that depended on everything operating smoothly, and we were able to do it over a weekend without impacting operations. I don’t think we would have been able to make this happen in nine months without Keste and Oracle.”

Since migrating their production workloads to the cloud, Maritz has seen a 10X improvement in performance. For instance, concurrent financial processes that used to take 2 hours are now completed in 10 minutes, and there is no latency when it comes to form refreshes. In addition, they have been able to reduce their DR window from 72 hours to 4 hours.

Maritz has also cited that they have been able to enhance their security posture with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because, by default, all data is encrypted at rest.

“The story with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is that it’s better, cheaper and faster than what we had on-premises.” explains Hunsaker. “We’re seeing jobs that used to take a couple hours to run, getting completed in minutes now on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.”

Migrated sandbox, dev/test, production and disaster recovery environments for E-Business Suite and an additional 26+ applications over a weekend without impacting operations

Alleviated the burden on the IT staff

10x improvement in performance

Reduced DR window from 72 hours to 4 hours

Stronger security since all data is encrypted at rest

Better managed infrastructure costs through an OPEX model

Enable IT staff to focus on more customer-facing, revenue-generating, and value-added efforts rather than on keeping the lights on