Specialized Bicycle Components shifts to Oracle Cloud
Amid a bike-buying boom, leading bicycle manufacturer moves its Oracle E-Business Suite and Agile PLM applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“In OCI, we just flip a switch to instantly scale up for more capacity, and then scale back down when our traffic levels off. You just can’t beat that.”
Business challenges
During the past year, as COVID-19 brought a wave of new and re-energized bike riders, the message to Specialized Bicycle Components from riders, retailers, and staff was clear: we need more bikes. While bike sales industrywide nearly doubled typical seasonal levels in April 2020, the pandemic forced many port closures and factory quarantines, creating a global supply-chain crisis. These events, coupled with having to run an ERP system on an older, on-premises data center architecture, made it even more difficult for Specialized to respond fast enough to meet its demand.
With millions of customers, partners, and staff spread across 40 countries, moving to a new ERP system, and reconfiguring more than 200 integrations built around that application, was not an option for the company.
Using Oracle Data Guard helps us continuously run these sites in sync mode, which gives us the assurance that our backups are always available and current.
Why Specialized Chose Oracle
After assessing the cost savings, performance, and uptime benefits to move multiple terabytes of data within Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Agile Product Lifecycle Management to the cloud, Specialized quickly reached a consensus to move these workloads to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Results
After moving to the high-performance Oracle Exadata Cloud Service in OCI, Specialized saw huge increases in online transactional and data warehousing batch processing performance. Specialized also gained flexibility to dynamically scale CPU cores, and provision virtual machines up or down on demand with pay-per-use economics. Availability increased with automated updates in its operating systems within minutes.
By setting up both public and private subnets, Specialized has a much more reliable and persistent connection between its point-of-sales system, databases, and business applications—and its customers, retailers, cloud vendors, and other third parties.
Running an Oracle WebLogic Server on a two-node Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) using Oracle Exadata Cloud Service gives Specialized a much higher-availability, fault-tolerant environment where it can process sales transactions from consumers through its website, while at the same time update inventories, production and delivery schedules, and accounts receivables on the back end.
While its bikes are engineered for speed and comfort in style, Specialized’s cloud environment is architected for speed and security at scale. With Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Load Balancing and OCI API Gateway to manage the application tiers, Oracle RAC to divide interfaces on different subnets, and Oracle Enterprise Manager to monitor the entire cluster, there’s no more waiting, and no scheduled downtime.
To protect its main workloads running in Oracle’s Phoenix cloud region, Specialized has replicated its Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle PLM, and Oracle Databases in the Oracle Cloud region in Ashburn, Virginia. "The design of OCI gives us true disaster recovery," Pham says. Even in the event of a failover, "using Oracle Data Guard helps us continuously run these sites in sync mode, which gives us the assurance that our backups are always available and current."