Simon, it’s great to have you here talking with us today for our Oracle Applications & Technology Users Group’s blog. Let’s start with your introduction. You are with Amazon Web Services, mostly well-known as AWS. Tell us about yourself, your role at AWS, and what you’d like for our OATUG members to know about you and your organization. I understand you’re based in Reading, UK.
Yes, that’s right, and thanks for the opportunity to speak with you. I’m in Reading, which is a town about 40 minutes outside of London. A lot of tech companies are here in Reading, including Oracle and Microsoft.
I am Senior Solutions Architect for the World-Wide Specialist Organization at AWS. I've been working with local technologies for over 20 years now, and with many different customers, in many roles including consulting roles, and in migration projects for enterprise customers to AWS.
And what attracted me to AWS was one of its Leadership Principles, which we call “customer obsession.” That resonates quite well with me, and I've seen it firsthand. Working here at AWS, in every piece of work we do, we focus on the customer first and then work backward.
What is your background?
I first started off as an Oracle apps developer way back in my junior years, so I’ve worked 22 years now with Oracle products, middleware, and databases. Now, I am focusing on Oracle ERP applications and the big enterprise applications in AWS.
That’s impressive. So you really understand how Oracle products were originally put together, and all the computer science of it, right?
Yes, exactly. I’ve done many Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades, upgrading from some of the earlier versions such as 11.0.3, which is ancient now. The first version I worked on in the database was 8.0.6, I believe. Now obviously we’re on the latest version, so I’ve worked through all the versions up until today. I’d like to say I’ve seen and worked through most of the challenges experienced by customers. I have a few more gray hairs now to prove it.
I can imagine! But I think customers feel really comfortable when they know somebody working with them knows the product from the inside out. What interests you the most in working with customers? And what are some ways AWS sets itself apart from other services that might be similar?
Working with migration strategies and architectural patterns is what really interests me. In my opinion the AWS platform offers customers great options from a high availability standpoint, and AWS has a large ecosystem of machine types that offer high-quality performance.
AWS has been in the cloud business for a long time now, and we’ve been helping companies migrate and run Oracle workloads and Oracle ERP applications in AWS for over ten years.
AWS offers the broadest, deepest functionality and the most secure environment in terms of services. We’ve got over 200 products and services to help customers use and modernize their applications. We have services such as IoT, analytics and machine learning (ML), and many more, which can help customers modernize their applications once they are in AWS.
As I mentioned at the beginning, we are a customer-obsessed company. We are guided by our customers for our vision for the future. We’ve built a whole practice around migrating Oracle ERP applications, like Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and many more to AWS because of a customer need.
I’ve heard about what AWS calls “next-generation applications.” Can you explain more about that?
Next-generation applications help customer modernize and innovate their ERP applications. Generally speaking, Oracle ERP applications and monolithic applications are heavily customized off-the-shelf applications. They cost a lot. It's very hard for organizations to have their own analytics on-premises.
By moving to AWS, we have the ability to think beyond ERP for these applications by using cloud-native technologies and services around the periphery. New technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) can help customers increase automation in their operations, leading to simplified solutions that save time and money. With cloud-native services that easily integrate with your existing applications, you can respond to the changing needs of your customers with agility and speed.
So what you are saying is, with AWS services and applications, the “next generation” means that you're actually not just helping people migrate their platforms, but you're actually expanding their functionality during the migration, is that right?
Yes, exactly. Once they're in AWS, customers can start reaping the benefits by modernizing the application and integrating their Oracle systems with AWS cloud-native services.
This is fascinating to a non-computer science person like me, and it sounds like a solid customer value proposition!
Yes, it’s a game-changer. We also have Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2), which offers the broadest and deepest compute platform, with over 500 instances and choice of the latest processor, storage, networking, operating system, and purchase model to help customers best match the needs of their workload.
In addition to that, we’ve also got 87 availability zones in 27 geographic regions. We’ve announced plans for another 21 more availability zones and seven AWS regions. That’s Australia, Canada, India, Israel, New Zealand, Spain, and Switzerland.
What about your partner network? How does it enhance your customer experience?
We have an expansive partner network with more than 100,000 partners in 150 countries. This diverse network of partners can help customers deliver greater value for their business, increase agility, and lower costs.
We have partners who specialize in helping customers architect, deploy, and manage Oracle-based workloads and applications running on the AWS Cloud. These partners have technical proficiency and proven customer success working with Oracle on AWS. If you’re interested in learning more about how these partners, check out this link: AWS Oracle Competency Partners.
Now, briefly, tell us about a couple of case studies. At OATUG, we always enjoy learning from them. What can you share about your successes with some of your customers?
One that comes to mind right away is Equifax, a leading credit reporting agency. In this case, they were running multiple financial applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite, Hyperion, and billing applications, all on-premises. They were facing some infrastructure challenges and scalability issues, which led to their decision to migrate these workloads to AWS. Some of the benefits they achieved include a 300% performance improvement. They were able to scale faster and respond to global growth with a performance uplift after moving to AWS.
Next, let me tell you about Arizona State University who was running their Peoplesoft application in a privately hosted environment since 2007. The application supports 120,000 students and over 17,00 employees. With the help of Sierra-Cedar, an Advanced Consulting Partner, they were able to take this Peoplesoft application which was running on a 5-node Real Applications Cluster (RAC), and migrate that to a single instance running on AWS' Relational Database Service (RDS). This modernized their application and gave them the flexibility to scale up or down based on usage and saved on costs.
Simon, I have learned so much, and this has been so interesting, but we have run out of time. Our members appreciate this opportunity to hear directly from you. Where can they reach you with further questions?
Thank you, Deborah. You can contact me through LinkedIn or through our website.
OATUG members, to learn more about running Oracle EBS on AWS, view the October 25, 2022 webinar recording on-demand.