Introduction
Patch Solutions – PatchPay service, provides HRMS & Payroll as a service based on Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud, Oracle eBusiness Suite applications and Oracle Database 19c. By combining the capabilities of Oracle Payroll and Oracle Fusion HCM Cloud, PatchPay offers an end-to-end enterprise class HCM & payroll solution. The Oracle Payroll application within Oracle eBusiness Suite, hosted and managed by Patch Solutions, is provided as a subscription service.
BSC – a long term partner and service provider to Patch Solutions, provides the cloud managed services and technical expertise to keep PatchPay available 24x7x365.
Company Overview
Patch Solutions are a leading provider for Oracle HCM and Payroll consulting, support and managed services. Patch Solutions are based in Sydney, Australia and service customers globally.
BSC provides consulting, support and hosting services for the Oracle technology stack. BSC provide the private cloud platform and management services for the PatchPay solution. BSC are based in Sydney, Australia and service customers globally.
Challenge/Problem
Whilst the on-premise private cloud platform hosting PatchPay had provided a resilient and secure environment for many years, there were a number of significant challenges that needed to be addressed:
- Key components of the infrastructure platform were approaching end of life and would require replacement.
- Workload requirements had increased across the platform. There would have to be significant increases in compute, network and storage capacity to continue to meet workload demands. The required upgrades would require and “uplift” in existing capacity, thus further increasing the project capex to purchase the infrastructure, and opex due to infrastructure support and maintenance fees.
- On-premise Oracle Database 19c licensing coverage limited the ability to scale up/down database capacity to meet seasonal workload requirements.
- Operational, compliance and hosting costs had seen significant increases. The combined cost of data centre fees, insurance, support and maintenance, compliance training, were rapidly increasing. Due to the commercial model of long term subscriptions, many of these costs were not able to be recovered during the subscription period.
- Modern hosting services needed to accommodate “subscription” based delivery models which can be very difficult to provide cost effectively on-premise. Capacity is either too much or too little, and you are typically working within rigid business constraints of the original capex investment. The inflexibility of this model severely limits the options to respond quickly to changes in demand and requirements.
Solution
After comparing the available on-premise and public cloud options, Patch Solutions and BSC selected OCI as the platform to host the Oracle eBusiness Suite and Oracle Database 19c components of the PatchPay solution. OCI provided the following benefits that were not available on-premise or from other public cloud providers:
- A mature set of migration tools to migrate enterprise class application platforms. The Oracle eBusiness Suite Cloud Manager reduced the time and resource requirements to complete the migration.
- Ability to migrate Oracle Database 19c to a scalable, high performance infrastructure platform using Oracle Database Cloud Service.
- High performance infrastructure that could be scaled up and down depending on workload. The flexibility of OCI allowed BSC to add and remove capacity across the platform on-demand with no lead time or up-front financial commitments.
- OCI provides robust, low cost infrastructure solutions for backup and disaster recovery. BSC were able to implement redundant, offsite backups quickly and easily.
- OCI provides a highly capable automation platform that allows for significant efficiency across the platform.
- OCI provides a simplified operating environment across a single technology stack. OCI allows BSC to reduce the “knowledge” spread required across the team when supporting on-premise infrastructure.
Results
The migration to OCI has been a huge success. The OCI cloud platform has opened up opportunities to increase performance and reduce cost that were simply not available on-premise. Notable benefits from the migration include:
- Significant opex reduction resulting from reduced vendor support fees, simplified technology stack, process automation.
- Major reductions in Oracle Database administration efforts from using the capabilities provided by Oracle Database Cloud Service.
- Completely eliminated the requirement for an expensive capex to refresh on-premise infrastructure.
- Reduction in batch processing jobs of approx 40% on “default” OCI infrastructure services.
- Flexibility to dial up/down services as required enables Patch Solutions to offer more dynamic solutions to the market.
The OCI migration has enabled Patch Solutions to continue to offer enterprise class Oracle HCM solutions without the cost burden of on-premise infrastructure.
Customer Quotes
“This was a great outcome. The migration was completed on time and within budget and we have already realised performance and efficiency gains since migrating to OCI”. John Sale, Patch Solutions.
