McGraw Hill launches multicloud data center exit with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
The global education company migrates critical workloads to OCI, achieving greater flexibility, significant cost savings, and space for innovation.
“The relationship is just as important as the technology. Oracle’s commitment to our data center exit’s success has been truly outstanding. The services we’re using in OCI and the technical support we’ve received have proven invaluable to our project.”
Business challenges
Since 1888, McGraw Hill has never stopped innovating to meet the ever-changing needs of educators and learners around the world. The leading global education company provides high-quality trusted content, flexible tools, and digital platforms to meet learners where they are so they can achieve their goals.
This same sense of innovation is also reflected in the company’s approach to technology—continually finding new ways to improve. A decade ago, McGraw Hill made the choice to exit its on-premises data centers for greater flexibility and efficiency. The company implemented its own internal cloud but faced similar issues to its on-premises environment with expensive hardware leases, time-consuming infrastructure provisioning, and an inability to dynamically scale for cost-efficiency.
McGraw Hill decided to migrate a majority of its digital products and end user workloads onto AWS and Azure. However, many of these environments had an Oracle database back end that still resided in McGraw Hill’s data centers, along with several Oracle E-Business Suite workloads, an enterprise data warehouse, and a supercluster of third-party applications running on VMware. The company sought a way to optimize these workloads in the cloud to align with its asset-light IT vision.
What stood out to us with OCI was the ability to run Exadata Cloud Service for our Oracle Database workloads and the comfort of having our EBS workloads in the same cloud.
Why McGraw Hill chose Oracle
After considering its options, McGraw Hill selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) as the new home for many of its critical back-office workloads. OCI was a natural fit for the company’s Oracle E-Business Suite workloads because of the application’s tight compatibility with the cloud infrastructure. This move would improve cost efficiency, maximize the productivity of IT staff, and provide the business with greater agility to respond to change.
McGraw Hill also decided to move its on-premises Oracle Exadata environment to Oracle Exadata Database Service running on OCI to support the large data workloads that sit beneath its digital products and Oracle E-Business Suite applications. Running Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI would allow for greater ease of provisioning and the ability to dynamically scale for changing demand without any system downtime.
Additionally, the company would take advantage of Oracle Cloud VMware Solution to bulk-migrate third-party applications to OCI without the need to change the tools. This would be key to McGraw Hill’s data center exit strategy, allowing the company to modernize applications with limited effort.
Results
With OCI, McGraw Hill gained a crucial partner and cloud infrastructure provider for its continuing data center exit. The company moved several Oracle E-Business Suite workloads to OCI—with more on the way—to support back-office functions like financials and order-to-cash processes. The collaboration between Oracle experts and the company’s longtime implementation partner Tata Consultancy Services provided the technical know-how to migrate the legacy environment to the cloud, helping McGraw Hill to meet the ever-changing demands of the business and its customers.
The transition to running Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI gave the company the efficiency it needed to run large, data-intensive workloads that supported both back-office applications and its customer-facing digital products. McGraw Hill saw a huge value in the service’s ability to dynamically scale OCPUs up and down to match workload demands without impacting operations, a key differentiator not seen in other cloud providers. This online scaling of compute resources also resulted in lower total costs compared to sizing for maximum capacity.
McGraw Hill was impressed by the outstanding technical resources and expertise provided by the Oracle Cloud Lift Services team, which were instrumental in helping stand up the company’s supercluster of VMware-based applications on Oracle Cloud VMware Solution. The team’s guidance allowed the company to begin migrating third-party applications en masse to OCI without any changes to best practices or tools. This proved to be another key win in McGraw Hill’s data center exit strategy, because it simplified the migration of applications to the cloud and gave the company the freedom to focus on planning and executing other projects.
The company built out plans for additional migrations to Oracle Cloud, including more Oracle E-Business Suite workloads, third-party applications, and its enterprise data warehouse running on Oracle Exadata Database Service. Oracle Support Rewards provides substantial cost savings, with more OCI usage resulting in more savings. These savings will be compounded further thanks to OCI’s zero data ingress charges, cost-efficient data egress charges, and market-leading price-performance.
As McGraw Hill pursues its vision of fully exiting its data centers, OCI will simplify and accelerate the process with easier infrastructure provisioning, faster time to delivery, and lower cost of ownership. The company will free up resources to focus on its true purpose—innovating to meet the needs of educators and learners around the world.
Partners
McGraw Hill sought the help of its long-time Oracle partner Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) for the data center exit. TCS used its deep understanding of McGraw Hill’s application and technology landscape to help the company achieve success with its migration to OCI and other cloud providers.
About the customer
McGraw Hill is a leading global education company that partners with millions of educators, learners, and professionals to help them access all the value that education can offer.