Privatization Holding Company lifts performance by 50% with Oracle Cloud

Privatization Holding Company migrates Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, freeing resources for enhanced financial innovation.

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The transition of migrating our Oracle ERP from on-premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was seamless—in fact, near perfect.

Neil VincentIT Manager, Privatization Holding Company

Business challenges

Privatization Holding Company (PHC) is an associate company of National Industries Group, one of the largest multisector business enterprises in Kuwait. PHC currently consolidates the accounts of all its subsidiary companies and handles the financial integration of these new acquisitions. It also manages investments in the public-private partnership ventures of the Kuwait government for infrastructure, renewable energy, and other sectors.

In 2012, PHC implemented Oracle E-Business Suite on-premises as the financials platform for PHC group companies. Five years later, PHC moved E-Business Suite to the Oracle public cloud platform to overcome the need to administer a data center on its own for Oracle workloads.

Why Privatization Holding Company chose Oracle

In 2020, with the opening of Oracle’s second-generation cloud region, the UAE East data center in Dubai, PHC decided to migrate its workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for higher performance.

PHC had looked at the cloud market and considered many proposals. Operating successfully with Oracle EBS since 2012, the company was encouraged by Oracle’s success in the cloud and signed a 3-year subscription to OCI based on business value presentations. “We presented the case to management, the budget was approved, and we took a three-year subscription with no proof of concept. We just had faith in Oracle,” says Muhammad Arshad, systems manager with PHC.

Results

PHC’s two-phase journey using the Oracle Cloud Dubai data center originated from extensive efforts to manage its data center, spurring the company to adopt a multicloud strategy. It migrated Oracle E-Business Suite, its key financials application, to Oracle’s cloud region in Frankfurt in 2017.

The move to OCI and Oracle Enterprise Database Service freed PHC from managing data centers and brought a 50% boost in performance compared to the on-premises environment in Kuwait City. The company no longer had to onboard new subsidiaries and the financials team was free to focus on innovation. “We couldn’t seamlessly add new holding companies in our on-premises systems,” says Arshad. “We had to buy and configure a new server each time. It was like a re-implementation over and over.” Now, when PHC acquires a company, it communicates the size of the new general ledger to OCI, which automatically assigns storage, memory, and processing speed.

The migration was completed right on time. The lead time for servers rose to eight months during the supply chain crisis triggered by the pandemic, confirming the move to OCI. “It worked out well because when COVID-19 hit, it was much less effort to have all Oracle E-Business Suite financials users working from home,” says Arshad. “And it cost us nothing, other than supplying computers.” The company could quickly spin up resources for new companies and remain operational without one minute of downtime.

Backup, another time-consuming chore involving replicating data to the on-premises disaster recovery site, became automated through the custom storage containers created in Oracle Database Backup Cloud. While moving Oracle E-Business Suite and other production instance workloads to the Oracle Cloud region in Dubai, PHC has converted the Frankfurt cloud region into its cloud disaster recovery site. “I’d say 25% of the overall improvement has come from OCI backup,” says Arshad.

Other elements in the 50% performance increase from on-premises to OCI include much faster management reporting. Financial statements are generated in seconds rather than minutes, a welcome outcome for business users consolidating many complex ledgers and assigning profitability according to holding company shares.

PHC is now encouraging sister companies to also migrate to the cloud, offering its migration experience through eLogics Systems, an Oracle Gold Partner subsidiary.

With OCI managing day-to-day operations, PHC can increasingly focus on innovating financial and investment platforms. “Innovation plays to our stockholders, who want to know how modern we are,” says Arshad. “Showing them that we have the best financial management solution with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure instills confidence and impacts our share price.”

A progressive transition to multicloud computing is part of the company’s innovation strategy. “We want to be 100% cloud, and at some point, we hope to consolidate Oracle, Azure, AWS, and Google clouds into one framework,” he says.

Partners

Elogics Systems and Oracle Cloud Lift Services assisted Privatization Holding Company with project management, technical decision-making, database administration, cloud lift and shift technical execution, applications implementation, user testing, rollout, and support and maintenance.

Published:March 11, 2022
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