Claremont and PPL - The Sound of a Smooth Migration

PPL had always hosted its Oracle E-Business Suite with a major, tier one Oracle hosting provider. They supplied a managed service, which included all DBA activities, patching, upgrades, back-ups and first-line product support, but the service was slow, inflexible and costly.

This hosting provider was a large, global organisation, with international teams and long-established, lengthy processes. PPL found that any system changes or upgrades took months to be agreed and even longer to be delivered. There was no visibility when it came to pricing models, which made getting quotes for additional storage a slow and painful process.

PPL had grown frustrated with the time it was taking to manage the different delivery teams, which were located all over the world. They even found it difficcult to engage their own service manager, who was also based abroad.

PPL was eager to work with a smaller, more agile supplier that could provide a faster, more flexible service.

It also required a UK-based service manager and local consultants who could offer pro- active, personal support. Keen, simultaneously, to lower its admin costs and maximize returns for its members, PPL was looking for a hosting provider that could deliver all this at a reduced rate.

After a short procurement process PPL selected Claremont for our personal approach, agility, speed, state-of-the-art hosting infrastructure and overall quality of service.

We listened and understood PPL’s concerns and shaped a simple, but cost-effective proposal that would offer PPL the same hardware, architecture and functionality that it had currently, but this time augmented by Claremont’s UK-based, bespoke support services.

We picked up the existing Oracle E-Business Suite instance, which

was hosted in the United States, and using our proven migration methodology, moved it seamlessly into Claremont’s own hosting. Being a critical and complex system that includes an Internet- facing implementation of Oracle iStore, which is used by the public to purchase music licenses, it was essential that the migration was successfully completed with minimal downtime.

First we built an exact copy of the current system on Claremont’s servers. Then we set up ongoing synchronisation so that the ‘copy’ was kept up to date continuously. We worked closely with PPL to perform multiple cycles of rigorous testing throughout the migration project – flagging and fixing any issues along the way.

While every aspect of the system was tested methodically, particular attention was given to ensuring that all customisations and interfaces operated as required on the new platform.

The transition was managed and delivered by Claremont’s Project Manager using our well-established migration methodology and project governance approach.

Upon ‘go-live’ the link from Claremont’s copy database to the old production system was broken. The copy environment was then quickly configured to become the new production instance.

After minimal downtime PPL saw the successful completion of a highly detailed, 175 step migration plan. “I had the overriding impression,” said Mark Douglas, PPL’s Chief Technology Officer, “that this has all been a bit of a non-event.”