ooba smooths their Oracle cloud migration

Summary

Looking to take advantage of the latest technology advances, mortgage originator ooba made the decision to move their Oracle Financial platform to the cloud. Working with us they were able to ensure that the process ran smoothly, with minimal disruption to business as usual. This included the creation of a custom interface to automate the transfer of data from the cloud-based financial and human resources systems to the payroll platform that remained on-premises.

Why ooba looked to the cloud

Over the years ooba have expanded their offering to include short-term insurance and mortgage protection insurance.

As an intermediary between consumers and financial institutions, technology is an essential component of the business model. The company has always looked to take advantage of the latest technology and improve efficiencies to help them achieve their objectives.

A longstanding Oracle user, they were running these systems on-premises. With the system ageing and the need to refresh hardware on the horizon, they started to examine how they could take advantage of this situation.

They also wanted to extend their learning environment beyond the organization to embrace the broader range of stakeholders who make up the business ecosystem.

Following an evaluation of the options they decided to move the majority of their Oracle applications to the cloud. After working directly with Oracle to purchase the required modules they approached us to help them migrate the systems.

This wasn’t a simple task as their payroll system needed to remain on-premises, as the cloud-based offering wasn’t able to offer the localization they required at this point.

How they smoothed the migration process

The migration of ooba’s Oracle environment to the cloud needed to be carefully planned as they couldn’t afford any downtime. Following the recommended Oracle methodology, which involved a detailed planning process, they were able to ensure that all the relevant business processes were correctly replicated.

ooba were moving four key systems over to the cloud: Financial, Human Resources Management, Absence and Learning. This required that all elements of the business were involved in the planning process.

Once this was complete, we made sure that all the relevant roles were defined and that the relevant security and other policies were in place. It was also necessary to understand where there were differences between the customizations that ooba had implemented and the functionality available in the cloud offering.

A key challenge remained the integration of the cloud services with the payroll solution that needed to remain on-premises. In order to deliver the functionality that ooba were looking for, namely the ability to automate the transfer of information, we had to develop an interface to ensure that all the relevant data was accurately transferred between the payroll and cloud platforms.

Once the build was complete, the data migration needed to be started. This consisted the Master Data and Transactional Data streams for both Financials and HCM.

What flexibility the cloud provides to ooba

With the cloud solution in place, ooba can now take advantage of the benefits that working from the cloud provides.

Key to this is the ability to adopt new functionality as it becomes available. The Oracle SaaS is updated quarterly and for each cycle ooba can decide what new functionality they want to implement. Once that is confirmed, all their users have access to the upgraded features. Previously ooba would be responsible for doing the upgrades themselves, however now this is done by Oracle.

ooba have the ability now to implement additional modules far quicker than before as the functionality is all part of the cloud system, cutting the time it takes to procure and implement new modules. The Oracle cloud also offers them the opportunity to streamline their business processes to bring them in line with the best practices built into the cloud service.

They’re seeing a reduction in the costs associated with their core systems, as they only pay for the capacity they use, and are freed from the expensive hardware maintenance and upgrade cycles that accompanies on-premises solutions.

There is also the opportunity to take advantage of Oracle’s embedded analytics tool to interrogate their data to gain greater insights into the performance of the company and the behavior of their customers.