NEC boosts productivity and app development on Oracle Cloud
The IT service provider adopts Oracle Autonomous Database and APEX for low-code app development, improving time to market and the partner experience.
“We are very grateful to Oracle for supporting us on this journey to move our business applications to the cloud. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure we can make app changes instantly and they are available to all our partners without any dependency from each local on-premises system. We now have hundreds of users on our cloud-based app, and they are very happy.”
Business challenges
NEC Enterprise Solutions is a multinational corporation that provides IT and network software and services—including cloud computing, AI, IoT, and communications equipment—to small, medium, and large enterprises in the private and public sectors worldwide.
NEC Corporation prides itself with over $29 billion in annual revenue, 75 million global users, and 110,000 employees. Headquartered in Japan, NEC Enterprise Solutions is a division of NEC Corporation. It works with more than 1,000 partners to serve customers throughout the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region.
As part of its efforts to improve partner and customer experiences and boost the productivity of its sales team, NEC decided to revamp its business applications environment. This meant moving an internally built Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) application from Microsoft SQL Database on-premises to the cloud so that users could perform more complex configurations and generate timely offers. NEC also wanted to be able to deploy changes to the CPQ application more quickly and with fewer resources involved.
Migrating the CPQ application to a cloud-based environment would also address mobility needs, enabling sales partners across the region to access the app from anywhere, on any device. Ultimately, the IT environment also had to improve performance and end user access.
Being on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, we can develop applications much quicker compared to a traditional development environment. Our US-based colleagues were impressed with the number of applications we’ve built using Oracle Autonomous Database with APEX with just three developers over the past years.
Why NEC Enterprise Solutions Chose Oracle
After evaluating several providers for data-driven, low-code environments, including OutSystems and Mendix, NEC chose Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing with Oracle APEX on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure based on cost efficiency, ease of use, and the integrated development capabilities.
Results
With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, NEC has gained the much-needed flexibility to make use of on-demand compute power and a consumption-based payment model. The company is able to ramp up performance and capacity as needed in accordance with the number of users and their licensing agreements.
Meanwhile, the autonomous cloud database has eliminated database administration with machine learning provisioning, patching, encryption, and autoscaling.
The automated security patches and updates performed by Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing have helped NEC reduce the workload for database administrators and improve performance to support hundreds of users. Combined with Oracle Application Express (APEX), which also supports NEC’s CPQ app, the IT team’s administrative and maintenance efforts have been cut dramatically, leaving developers more room for improving existing products and building new products and services.
NEC also opted to use Oracle Identity Cloud Service as an authentication solution for its applications, enabling single sign-on and multifactor authentication for improved end user access and compliance with NEC Corporation’s guidelines for data governance.