Namoi Cotton upgrades key apps on OCI, cutting costs and boosting performance

After three years of drought including two years of pandemic-induced economic disruption, Namoi Cotton, Australia’s largest cotton processor, is back to ginning up new business. Prices for lint cotton—the raw fiber from the cotton plant after the ginning process removes the seed and other unwanted material—are at their highest levels in years due to pent-up demand, rising inflation, and the continued supply chain disruptions stemming from the global pandemic.

During the drought and into the pandemic, however, Namoi Cotton accumulated a lot of technical debt—systems it hadn’t upgraded in years because finances were tight. Exhibit A was the company’s core Oracle JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.1 suite of applications—for accounts receivable, accounts payable, and spare parts inventory. Those on-premises applications were long past their end of life and thus were expensive to maintain and no longer eligible for security patches, bug fixes, and other important updates.

As Namoi Cotton’s business started to expand again, the company’s new manager of IT, Jim Tolson, proposed to management that Namoi Cotton upgrade those outdated applications, running on outdated hardware, and host them in a public cloud. But Tolson would have to make a compelling case for the cloud migration, keeping costs to a minimum.

After evaluating cloud infrastructure offerings from Oracle, Microsoft, and Amazon Web Services, Tolson and team decided to move the company’s Oracle JDE applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), upgrading the apps to the 9.2 version in the process.

Initially, after giving AWS “a quick look,” Tolson and team were leaning toward Microsoft, having already moved most of Namoi Cotton’s server infrastructure to Azure. “But once we got the Oracle crew to show us the OCI platform properly, the conversation changed very quickly,” he says.

For starters, Oracle JDE applications perform better on OCI than they do on third-party cloud infrastructure, Tolson notes. “I’ve got Oracle software running on Oracle infrastructure, and my long-term goal is to try to get as much of it onto Oracle Linux as I can,” he says. “Oracle applications on an Oracle OS running on Oracle infrastructure—in my mind that’s a no-brainer.”

Still, a gating factor was the price of the cloud migration. Namoi Cotton’s management considered the initial quotes from all three cloud providers to be too high. Tolson subsequently connected Namoi Cotton’s go-to systems integrator, Fusion5 Business Solutions, with the Oracle Cloud Lift Services team, who figured out a way to slash the price of the implementation. “At that point, the executive team was happy to go ahead with it,” Tolson says.

The price tag for migrating Namoi Cotton’s on-premises Oracle JDE applications to OCI, including the upgrade to JDE 9.2, came in at about AUD$120,000, a savings of more than 60% compared with the original quotes. Furthermore, the company’s move to Oracle Cloud reduced its ongoing system maintenance costs, while mitigating the security and downtime risks—and associated costs—of running end-of-life applications on outdated hardware. Oracle has committed to supporting JDE 9.2 until 2033.

While it’s difficult to assign percentages to application performance improvements, running the latest Oracle JD Edwards apps on the latest Microsoft database and virtual machines in Oracle Cloud has noticeably improved performance for the applications’ 200 or so users, most of whom work in corporate finance. Processing that used to take minutes can now take seconds, Tolson says. “Anything we’ve moved to OCI is running far faster there than we could’ve ever hoped for on our on-prem servers,” he says.

Moving the applications to Oracle Cloud also makes it easier for Namoi Cotton’s five-person IT team to scale capacity as the business grows.

Over the next 6 to 12 months, Namoi Cotton and partner Fusion5 will evaluate implementing additional 9.2 modules and features as well as how to take advantage of additional OCI capabilities.

Fusion5, Namoi Cotton’s Australian-based systems integrator—working closely with Oracle Cloud Lift Services, whose work included OCI, network, security architecture and design, and JDE environment migration strategy to OCI—was instrumental in the successful completion of the migration in just a few months. Namoi Cotton’s Oracle JDE 9.2 instance went live on OCI, using the JDE one-click provisioning tool, in March 2022.

“It was seamless. The two teams speak the same language,” Tolson says. “The project manager on the Oracle team and the project manager on the Fusion5 team worked really well together. Everything was well-aligned. I couldn’t have asked for more.”