Burns & McDonnell moves its core on-premises software to Oracle Cloud
Professional services firm upgrades to Oracle Exadata Cloud Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to boost performance, cut costs, and simplify management.
“We look forward to using Oracle Exadata Cloud Service with X8M’s orders-of-magnitude improvements in latency, IOPS, and throughput. ”
Business challenges
Since 1898, Kansas City-based Burns & McDonnell has provided engineering, architecture, construction, and environmental consulting services to governments, manufacturers, healthcare providers, transportation companies, and other enterprises worldwide.
As the company grew, it struggled to support its expanding customer base, supplier network, and remote field engineers with its array of highly customized on-premises software systems, which were difficult and expensive to maintain. Burns & McDonnell’s IT staff had become overburdened.
Data latency hampered the systems’ performance, making it difficult to quickly and accurately update time sheets, cost out projects, and manage client projects. Burns & McDonnell looked to consolidate and standardize its applications and databases onto a single, cloud-based infrastructure.
We chose Exadata Cloud Service so that we could easily and immediately scale up to meet demand spikes, without having to buy and deploy additional infrastructure in our data center.
Why Burns & McDonnell Chose Oracle
Burns & McDonnell moved its customized, integrated Oracle E-Business Suite applications (including financials, procurement, project management, core HR, payroll, supplier portal) and its Oracle Databases onto Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, running on Oracle Cloud infrastructure.
With its implementation partner, Candid Source, Burns & McDonnell had considered moving to Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. But because the company already was running its Oracle applications and databases on an on-premises Oracle Exadata machine, it decided that it made more sense to move those workloads to Oracle Exadata Cloud Service instead.
Results
By setting up multiple testing environments on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Burns & McDonnell was able to swiftly move its E-Business Suite applications and Oracle Databases from on-premises to the cloud.
Using OCI block storage and virtual machines for compute and databases during the testing period, the company was able to minimize downtime during the cutover weekend.
Burns & McDonnell’s IT team no longer has to manage the hardware, storage, and networking infrastructure to support its core applications and databases. By handing off that heavy lifting to Oracle, Burns & McDonnell’s IT team can focus on scaling the business to meet demand spikes, without having to worry about buying and deploying additional infrastructure in the company’s data center.
Since Burns & McDonnell moved its databases and applications to Oracle Exadata Cloud Service, it has reduced its IT infrastructure costs by 35%.
The company plans to upgrade to Oracle Exadata Cloud Service X8M, which will allow for even faster processing of multiple jobs simultaneously. Burns & McDonnell anticipates 2.5 times better performance and 10 times lower latency than its current version of Oracle Exadata Cloud Service.
Partners
Through engaging in previous successful Burns & McDonnell migrations and upgrade initiatives, Candid Source, an Oracle Platinum Partner, assisted with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure project from start to finish. In working closely with the internal IT team, Candid Source developed an extensive migration plan that included setting up multiple environments for testing and using tools to ensure minimum down time during the cut-over weekend.