A working Oracle Retail test environment delivered on AWS for < 10% of cost and available in 33% of the time quoted by the software vendor.
The Situation
The client, a duty free retailer with locations throughout North and Latin America, had been using an older version of Oracle Retail on premise for a number of years.
They are already using AWS as chosen cloud provider for other areas of the business.
They wanted to have a sandbox of the latest v16 to decide whether an upgrade was warranted.
Oracle quoted them more than the cost of physical hardware for a single v16 environment on Oracle cloud PER MONTH.
It would also take more than six weeks for the environment to be available.
Cloudgenerators.com was contacted on 22nd January 2019 to discuss our solution.
On 20th February 2019, an agreement was signed to provide a v16 environment on AWS.
The Task
Our task was to provide an environment quicker and cheaper than the Oracle alternative.
The good news is we have spent the last four years developing an automated solution for this so the build takes about 70 minutes.
The bad news was that we have built our solution in the EU West 1 AWS region (Dublin) but the client is in Florida, USA with the nearest region being US East 1 (N.Virginia).
The Action / Approach
We needed to replicate our infrastructure to the US East region.
Then once replicated and tested, we could use our rapid build process to install the environment they needed and configure for access by the client.
The Result
The retail client had access to the sandbox environment less than two weeks after giving the go ahead and have been using it for the past six months without problems for evaluation purposes.
The retail client is on a subscription model which so far has, in total, cost them less than 10% of the one month cost they were quoted by Oracle.
The retail client has seamless access to the Oracle Retail environment from their on premise desktops and servers.
The retail client is not locked in as they can give us a months notice to end the subscription.
They can then decide if they want to keep the current environment, and pay a one off fee or have it terminated with nothing further to pay.
The fee per enviroment to transition the environment over to the retailer is a still a fraction of what Oracle or other system integrators charge for an installation.
We have introduced them to colleagues in Australia who are currently working on data conversion from their existing production instance into the provided environment.
We have been supporting them with adhoc tasks such as resizing the environment from a sandbox to one capable of handling the volume and performance needed for a data conversion environment.
Additional environments can be spun up in about 70 minutes each if required.
All our work has been carried out remotely from the UK with a handful of conference calls.
