How two companies saved big by moving on-premises enterprise resource planning apps to the cloud

Many companies have made big investments in on-premises applications, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, and they aren’t eager to move to software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps yet. But IT teams at those companies are tired of the cost and grind of running a data center to support on-premises workloads.

The IT team at Burns & McDonnell was overloaded with administration and maintenance work to keep up with the strong growth in the firm’s engineering, architecture, construction, and environmental consulting businesses. Moving the firm’s databases and applications to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) reduced its IT infrastructure costs by 35% and gave the IT team enough breathing room to do higher-value work, such as planning for more growth.

Bangladeshi garment exporter Ananta Apparels got fed up with the expense and risks of running Oracle E-Business Suite in its own data center. Moving the application to the cloud cut infrastructure costs an estimated 50%. The company has reduced the financial overhead of managing an on-premises data center—hardware, upgrades, and maintenance personnel—by at least 40%.

Here’s more insight into how these two companies are running E-Business Suite on OCI and how that’s paying off.

KEEP THE APPS, SKIP THE HARDWARE

Kansas City-based Burns & McDonnell has spent years customizing its on-premises Oracle E-Business Suite enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The IT team has built deep integrations for the financials, procurement, project management, HR, payroll, and supplier portal modules to fit the company’s exact business needs.

Sasha Banks-Louie, Brand journalist is the author of this article

While rearchitecting all that work was unthinkable, Burns & McDonnell’s IT teams were struggling to support the company’s expanding customer base, supplier network, and remote field engineers using on-premises software systems, which were becoming increasingly difficult and expensive to maintain.

To better accommodate its 7,600 engineers, construction professionals, architects, technologists, and scientists leading projects worldwide, the employee-owned firm set up multiple testing environments on OCI. The IT team tapped Oracle’s flexible infrastructure services and reference architectures to swiftly move E-Business Suite applications and Oracle Databases to Oracle Exadata Cloud service.

With Oracle managing the infrastructure for core applications, Burns & McDonnell’s IT team can quickly scale systems to meet demand spikes, without having to worry about buying and managing more infrastructure in the company’s data center.

LOWER COSTS, TIGHTER SECURITY AT SCALE

Ananta Apparels moved its plant operations software and corporate applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, to OCI.

“We selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its superior functionality and ease of use for our end users,” says Azmal Hossain, assistant general manager and head of ICT. “The freedom to pay per use, the flexibility to customize, and the high security of OCI enable us to rapidly scale, at a very low total cost of ownership.”

Since moving its E-Business Suite applications to OCI, Ananta Apparels estimates it has cut infrastructure costs in half, improved overall system performance by 50%, and cut the financial overhead of managing an on-premises data center by at least 40%.


Sasha Banks-Louie is a Brand journalist covering Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with an emphasis on startups and researchers. Permaculture farmer, animal rescuer.


 

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