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.