Estuate Helps Leading Mining Company Dig for Savings with IBM Optim CHALLENGE After growing its company through mergers and acquisitions, a leading mining company found itself with several redundant instances of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). Hoping to eliminate the cost of maintaining these instances, the company wanted to retire them while maintaining access to several years’ worth of company data.
SOLUTION Estuate implemented the IBM Optim Data Growth Solution, retired the company’s unneeded instances of Oracle E-Business Suite, archived all the data from the applications, and delivered a reporting capability for the retired data.
RESULTS Using application retirement best practices, the mining company and Estuate:
Retired three older instances of Oracle EBS. Consolidated the enterprise on one production instance of Oracle EBS. Maintained access to 4-5 years’ worth of archived corporate data. Finished a projected seven-week project in two weeks. Reduced storage requirements, processing times, and projected future hardware requirements.
MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS LEAVE COMPANY WITH REDUNDANT BUSINESS APPLICATIONS A U.S.-based mining company is a major primary silver
Suite applications—and corresponding databases—left
producer and growing gold producer. The company
over from previous implementations.
operates three new, large precious metals mines that
These redundant applications presented two problems.
generate significant production, sales, and cash flow in
First of all, they added to the cost, risk, and complexity of
continued strong metals markets.
managing the company’s IT infrastructure. Second, they
How did the company come to lead its market? Much of
left the company vulnerable to potential compliance issues
its growth was driven by mergers and acquisitions—in
related to data retention. Rather than simply accept these
particular, by a pair of 2007 acquisitions that dramatically
problems as part of the cost of doing business, the
increased its silver production. But although the
company took action.
company’s acquisitions have given it a competitive
“Many companies simply continue to keep their old
advantage, they have also presented its IT team with
applications in production because they need to maintain
challenges in managing corporate applications and data.
access to the data,” explains Marc Hebert, chief operating
The company recently assessed its business
officer, Estuate. “But this is an inefficient and expensive
applications and found it was running multiple instances
strategy that wastes precious IT budget. This leading
of Oracle E-Business Suite, including versions 10.7 v7,
mining company took a proactive approach by seeking to
10.7 v8, 11.5.8 v8, and 11.5.9 v8. The company also
retire redundant instances of its Oracle E-Business Suite.”
discovered numerous abandoned Oracle E-Business
IBM’S “GO-TO” CONSULTING FIRM GUIDES APPLICATION RETIREMENT The mining company began to look for an application
At the suggestion of IBM, the company engaged Estuate
decommissioning solution that could not only help it
to implement Optim and guide the application
consolidate its operations on one version of Oracle E-
decommissioning process. Estuate came into the project
Business Suite, but also allow business users to maintain
with significant experience in application retirement.
access to historical data. Any potential solution would need to archive older data in a way that made it searchable in the event of legal or regulatory challenges. ®
“We’ve executed a number of decommissioning projects involving Oracle E-Business Suite,” Hebert remarks. “Oftentimes, the different instances are running on
The company ultimately chose IBM Optim™, a solution
different hardware platforms, and require a great deal of
designed to make application retirement easier and safer
hardware, software, and labor costs to maintain. One of
by providing the capability to archive data in its original
the main advantages of using IBM Optim to retire
business context. During the archiving process, Optim
applications is that it ensures application data will remain
preserves each archived business object as an audit-ready
accessible to our clients’ reporting tools of choice.”
“snapshot in time.” Optim also provides specific archive and retrieval capabilities that address data retention compliance needs, allowing organizations to effectively implement their decommissioning projects.
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www.estuate.com - t: 408.400.0680
ARCHIVED APPLICATIONS AND DATA REMAIN ACCESSIBLE TO EMPLOYEES Heading into the project, Estuate planned to take seven weeks to implement the IBM Optim data growth solution. But using Estuate’s
ABOUT ESTUATE
proven methodology, Estuate and the mining company completed the project in just two weeks—despite the complexity of consolidating data from several disused databases. In the process, Estuate decommissioned outdated versions of Oracle E-Business Suite, and archived all data from the retired applications into one common
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, Estuate is a global information technology services company that specializes in helping companies establish and improve enterprise data
archived repository.
management strategies and best Estuate also put IBM Optim Open Data Manager in place to allow access to the archive file repository. As a result, the mining company can use Oracle Discoverer for ad hoc querying and reporting of the
practices. Estuate is IBM’s go-to partner for the ®
implementation of IBM Optim
archived data.
Solutions for custom applications, Having retired several instances and consolidated its IT footprint,
Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft,
what benefits will the company experience in the years to come?
Siebel and JD Edwards. We have
Employees now have one place to go for four to five years’ worth of
IBM mainframes. Estuate was one of
issues. Because that data has been removed from the main
the early partners involved in the
production database and is now archived in a compact format, the
Oracle-to-DB2 migration program. We
company has reduced its storage requirements, processing times,
work closely with IBM account teams
and projected future hardware requirements.
to meet our mutual clients' Enterprise
“Any time a corporation can avoid running multiple application
Data Management needs.
instances in today’s complex IT environment, it’s a clear win,” Hebert concludes. “Because IBM Optim provides everything a company needs to archive applications and their data in a compact yet highlyaccessible format, there’s no reason not to explore the benefits of application retirement. The investment you make up front today translates to clear savings down the road.”
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expertise on distributed platforms and
historical data, which will streamline research for legal or regulatory
www.estuate.com - t: 408.400.0680
For more information contact: Marc Hebert, Estuate’s COO marc@estuate.com T: 510-468-7132