Global consulting firm Cognizant has successfully migrated its large PeopleSoft enterprise human capital management (HCM) application to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to improve performance and eliminate capacity issues at peak hours.
PeopleSoft serves more than 340,000 employees globally and about 170 applications take data from it, with over 180 total interfaces in operation. The company said it has "significantly" boosted its agility and reduced business risk by migrating production, non-production, and disaster recovery environments to OCI.
Cognizant’s associate director Gopi Krishnan Gunasekaran said the company could now achieve the ability to observe and manage its PeopleSoft environment using OCI native tools.
Cognizant previously used two separate systems for reporting and online transaction processing workloads.
It needed a solution to closely monitor and manage the increasing demand for its PeopleSoft application as employees regularly submitted project timesheets simultaneously that largely ‘impacted’ system performance. The firm could not afford any delays in financial processes or any operations activities.
Gunasekaran said they selected Oracle based on system performance and availability to support a complex IT ecosystem with more than 24 terabytes of data.
The company now runs both systems at the same time seamlessly on Oracle Exadata Database Service. It has improved batch performance using the system’s Smart Scan technology.
"Our hardware systems are no longer stressed even when up to 25,000 users submit project timesheets concurrently... We have a minimal business interruption", he added.
The migration
Cognizant has moved all applications from on-premises without any outages. It improved the availability of PeopleSoft application and finance databases each holding 12 terabytes of data, which the company calls its backbone.
Tools like OCI Application Performance Monitoring, OCI Database Management, and OCI Logging Analytics, have been key to the cloud transformation, the director said.
The tech provider could minimise implementation risk with Oracle Zero Downtime Migration and automatically transfer more than 24 terabytes of data to the cloud in just an hour of manual configuration, which usually takes multiple days.
By moving from Oracle Exadata on-premises to Exadata Database Service, the firm could increase the number of users by more than 40 percent without impacting performance.
“We started using OCI Observability and Management daily and this allowed us to see the complete PeopleSoft environment, from the load balancer to the web server and across all layers,” Gunasekaran said
This helped the technical staff to resolve issues within minutes.
The tech giant has also used Oracle Data Safe to improve data protection and ensure regulatory compliance. OCI Vault has allowed them to manage database and file system encryption keys all in a single place.
The Oracle Cloud implementation has reduced Cognizant’s time on hardware maintenance and supported smooth cloud transition, he concluded.
