NEC boosts agility with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

NEC Software Solutions  is a software and services business with more than 40 years of experience in the public sector. Its platforms and solutions are used by 95% of councils and all regional police forces in the UK, and its housing management software is used to manage more than 2 million households worldwide.

The company was acquired by NEC Corporation in 2018 and the name was changed from Northgate Public Services to NEC Software Solutions.

The company delivers its applications on-premises at the customer’s site, and as a managed service on its private cloud. It uses the low code Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX) with Oracle Database to build its software, including for its two largest applications—NEC Housing and NEC Revenues and Benefits.

Because housing benefit payments are tied to government legislation, which changes at least twice per year, the NEC Revenues and Benefits applications need to be highly flexible to ensure that any modifications, updates, and patches are rapidly implemented and rolled out to customers. For example, during the COVID-19 crisis—when the UK government made 43 legislative changes within a four-week period—NEC was the only revenues and benefits application provider to implement the required software changes for its customers within the set deadlines. This being a key business differentiator, the company wanted to further improve its service delivery and responsiveness, while also providing more cost-competitive solutions to customers.

NEC Software was looking to move its core applications to a public cloud to accelerate deployment times further, rapidly scale capacity up or down as required, and reduce its CapEx and infrastructure costs. Additionally, because the data managed with its applications is extremely sensitive, the company needed a cloud provider with a global presence so that data could be stored locally in regional data centers to comply with regulations.

NEC selected Oracle over Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services because Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was the best solution in terms of speed, performance, and price for running the company’s core Oracle APEX applications with Oracle Cloud Database Services, without any code modifications.

NEC deployed OCI for the production environment of its core housing management, revenues, and benefits applications. The cloud-based infrastructure environment enabled NEC to increase operational agility, reduce costs, deliver unlimited scalability, and provide better and more cost-efficient services for customers.

Using OCI’s automation capabilities, NEC cut its application build times from weeks to only hours. Meanwhile, with OCI’s rapid and unlimited scalability, NEC boosted its business agility and also simplified internal processes, such as forecast planning. Before OCI, the company had to regularly assess hardware capacity to anticipate whether additional capital expenditure was required.

Furthermore, with OCI’s global presence and data center deployment options, NEC can expand into territories that were previously difficult to penetrate because of data residency issues, and begin to offer customers the option to eliminate local infrastructure footprints.

The company has also realized significant cost savings thanks to OCI’s flat pricing model, which has allowed NEC to rapidly price customer proposals and more easily manage the costs for delivering its software and services.

Additionally, with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Azure Interconnect, NEC can ensure compatibility for potential customers that use Microsoft Azure and are worried about possible integration issues. OCI’s compatibility will also help NEC connect its housing management, revenues, and benefits applications to other systems deployed by its customers, such as finance applications, human resources software, and third-party systems used by housing maintenance contractors.