Welcome to Cloud Chronicles: Real-World Global Transformations. In today’s podcast, Megan Testani, VP of Marketing and Business Development at Project Partners, discusses with three organizations the lessons learned when migrating on-prem apps into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or Oracle Cloud Applications, the cost and ROI associated with that move, the role of managed services, and the ongoing maintenance of these technologies.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Let’s speak with Laurence Cauchy, the Enterprise Performance Management Center of Excellence Director for AtkinsRéalis. Laurence, looking back, what are some of the key lessons learned that you would share with other organizations considering a similar migration?
Laurence Cauchy, AtkinsRéalis: Start small. That would be my advice. I think Randy touched on it, and Jochen touched on it, too. It’s really important not to want to do everything at the same time in the beginning. But in the meantime, you need to build your application knowing what you want from it in the future.
So, you don’t need to do everything at first but build it to add to it, like just the dimensions and how you build your numbering system for your account. In the future, your chart of accounts will be changed. So, make sure you can make changes to it and that it’s not too complicated to make those changes.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you. Laurence. Next, let’s speak with Wino Verschoor, the Director of Applications for Vanderlande Industries. Wino, what were your lessons learned?
Wino Verschoor, Vanderlande: Yeah, I like that we did a proof of concept (POC) to gain the absolute confidence of our stakeholders, but also within IT itself because we moved from the blue stack to the red stack.
My people seemed to be married to IBM, the blue stacks, and we needed to build confidence and learn the big differences between both systems. They are fundamentally different in some aspects. So, the POC helped us make the change and also gained trust in the business that the performance was there and with IT that it was going to work. So that was an important step for me to make it happen, you know, to make it possible. So indeed, if it was not reaching our requirements, we have, of course, a list of requirements in order to measure it (success). We could have chosen otherwise. Yeah, but there’s definitely lots more possibilities. So, it was a real POC.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Wino. Let’s hear from Randy Martin, Director of Financial Applications, Strategy and Innovation for AtkinsRéalis. Randy, what were some of the lessons learned from your team’s perspective?
Randy Martin, AtkinsRéalis: Yeah, I think, just echo the sentiment I had earlier, which is just focusing on the things that we do well and offloading things that we don’t necessarily have a core competency in us, for us, managing our infrastructure. So I think that was probably our primary driving force behind what we did, which was to try to de-risk the organization a bit and futureproof things by moving into an infrastructure that we weren’t going to have to manage internally. And so that was that was our primary lesson learned was just focus on what you do well.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Randy. Jochen Rahm, the CTO for PROMATIS (an ITG Company) and the program manager for PRODINGER, please share with us the lessons that PRODINGER was able to learn through the migration process.
Jochen Rahm, PROMATIS: Yeah, I think what Laurence mentioned is, and I said before, I go with a step-by-step approach. My recommendation is if you do a big digitalization project also take into account that you, as Laurence also mentioned, make or draw a future picture of your application landscape or software infrastructure landscape or your integration landscape and build out of that your phased approach. This also shows a major target and what you will achieve with the business together and also explains exactly the steps you can take to get that. So I can get the confidence from the business over such a long journey.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Moving back to Randy Martin, what has been the impact of this migration on your overall IT costs, and how are you measuring the return on investment?
Randy Martin, AtkinsRéalis: Yeah, so our ROI for the move to OCI was about breakeven on whether we did the physical refresh of our on-premise infrastructure or invested in the move to OCI. So, in terms of a one-time ROI, it was pretty much breakeven. I think the real benefits we got, as I was talking about earlier, are really just in removing a significant headache of managing that infrastructure and the risks that that entailed. We were able to offload that and get it into a better situation with managed service and inside of OCI.
I mean, one of the things that I wanted to bring out, and I mentioned I didn’t mention this earlier, but I think OCI gives people on legacy applications or on-premise applications like EBS or JD Edwards. You can get a lot of the benefits of the cloud just by moving into OCI. You get scalability, you get performance, you get improved security posture. So, these are all things that you don’t have to move to a SaaS solution on your ERP to achieve the same benefits of the cloud.
And so, I think that’s an important message that I wanted to emphasize for us was it’s not that we’re not eventually going to go there with a SaaS solution. It just allowed us to do it in increments. So it was, I think, an important decision for us to be able to do that in steps.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you. Randy. Next, let’s speak with Wino. Wino, what is your perspective on cost and ROI?
Wino Verschoor, Vanderlande: Now we budgeted the project pretty, pretty strict. We also estimated cloud usage and expected managed service costs. It is difficult for me to compare the going position two years ago and now because we are now in one shape higher and we have implemented high-performance storage. So, they cannot be compared. But, we have a very good insight into cloud usage costs. We can also forecast the financial year, which is very good. It’s an intense pattern, so there were no surprises to us.
Costs were not our main driver for this change, but it was an important aspect. And there are no surprises, and it’s transparent.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Staying with Wino. Can you discuss the role of managed services in ensuring seamless cloud operations post-migration? How critical are these services to your ongoing success? Sure.
Wino Verschoor, Vanderlande: As I explained at the start, we have a scattered support landscape and the database middleware application over different partners. With this project, we moved it to one partner to view the whole stack. At first, it’s critical. Also, the partner delivers 24/7 support on a technical level. And that’s something we are not able to effectively arrange ourselves at this moment. So, the partner offers a really different knowledge, so we really have a good sparring partner on the content. But that’s, of course, really, really essential, I would say.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Wino. Let’s go to Randy Martin. Randy, how have you been able to use managed services to your advantage?
Randy Martin, AtkinsRéalis: Yeah, I mean, managed services for us was a big part of the move to OCI. We had experienced, like a lot of you probably, have small teams that manage things. So, resource availability or resource departure, someone leaves, it can cause critical shortages and knowledge within the company. And so, managing our infrastructure was really not a core competency. You know, that’s not our primary focus.
For us, the idea was to move the management of the servers and the infrastructure into an organization that does that well. And they do a lot of it. And they bring a lot of economy of scale of just being able to do that for less and more effectively than we could internally. So, as I said earlier, the marketplace for managed services in OCI is pretty rich. And so, there’s lots of options there. And so, for us, that gave us some confidence that we were making a good decision for the future of managing our infrastructure.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you, Randy. Moving back to Jochen. How have managed services helped PRODINGER?
Jochen Rahm, PROMATIS: I think one of the major challenges for PRODINGER was that you also know if you increase the functions of applications, you also need to increase, theoretically, your internal IT or your business process analysts internally. And for that, we offered them a breathing managed service model that we can capture and waive service credits. So that keeps them very flexible and also can scale their services depending on requirements and demand. And this is what we delivered at PROMATIS; we deliver exactly this as a service model, a breathing model. That helps them scale their internal IT resources.
Megan Testani, Project Partners: Thank you. Jochen. This concludes episode six of Cloud Chronicles Real World Global Transformations.
Join us for episode seven, where we will get into a Q&A with our panelists.
Did you miss episode five? Click here to listen in.
