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.

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MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS LEAVE COMPANY WITH REDUNDANT BUSINESS APPLICATIONS

IBM’S “GO-TO” CONSULTING FIRM GUIDES APPLICATION RETIREMENT

The mining company began to look for an application

decommissioning solution that could not only help it

consolidate its operations on one version of Oracle E-

Business Suite, but also allow business users to maintain

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.

The company ultimately chose IBM® Optim™, a solution

designed to make application retirement easier and safer

by providing the capability to archive data in its original

business context. During the archiving process, Optim

preserves each archived business object as an audit-ready

“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.

At the suggestion of IBM, the company engaged Estuate

to implement Optim and guide the application

decommissioning process. Estuate came into the project

with significant experience in application retirement.

“We’ve executed a number of decommissioning projects

involving Oracle E-Business Suite,” Hebert remarks.

“Oftentimes, the different instances are running on

different hardware platforms, and require a great deal of

hardware, software, and labor costs to maintain. One of

the main advantages of using IBM Optim to retire

applications is that it ensures application data will remain

accessible to our clients’ reporting tools of choice.”

A U.S.-based mining company is a major primary silver

producer and growing gold producer. The company

operates three new, large precious metals mines that

generate significant production, sales, and cash flow in

continued strong metals markets.

How did the company come to lead its market? Much of

its growth was driven by mergers and acquisitions—in

particular, by a pair of 2007 acquisitions that dramatically

increased its silver production. But although the

company’s acquisitions have given it a competitive

advantage, they have also presented its IT team with

challenges in managing corporate applications and data.

The company recently assessed its business

applications and found it was running multiple instances

of Oracle E-Business Suite, including versions 10.7 v7,

10.7 v8, 11.5.8 v8, and 11.5.9 v8. The company also

discovered numerous abandoned Oracle E-Business

Suite applications—and corresponding databases—left

over from previous implementations.

These redundant applications presented two problems.

First of all, they added to the cost, risk, and complexity of

managing the company’s IT infrastructure. Second, they

left the company vulnerable to potential compliance issues

related to data retention. Rather than simply accept these

problems as part of the cost of doing business, the

company took action.

“Many companies simply continue to keep their old

applications in production because they need to maintain

access to the data,” explains Marc Hebert, chief operating

officer, Estuate. “But this is an inefficient and expensive

strategy that wastes precious IT budget. This leading

mining company took a proactive approach by seeking to

retire redundant instances of its Oracle E-Business Suite.”

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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

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

archived repository.

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

archived data.

Having retired several instances and consolidated its IT footprint,

what benefits will the company experience in the years to come?

Employees now have one place to go for four to five years’ worth of

historical data, which will streamline research for legal or regulatory

issues. Because that data has been removed from the main

production database and is now archived in a compact format, the

company has reduced its storage requirements, processing times,

and projected future hardware requirements.

“Any time a corporation can avoid running multiple application

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 highly-

accessible 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.”

ABOUT ESTUATE

Headquartered in Silicon Valley,

Estuate is a global information

technology services company that

specializes in helping companies

establish and improve enterprise data

management strategies and best

practices.

Estuate is IBM’s go-to partner for the

implementation of IBM® Optim

Solutions for custom applications,

Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft,

Siebel and JD Edwards. We have

expertise on distributed platforms and

IBM mainframes. Estuate was one of

the early partners involved in the

Oracle-to-DB2 migration program. We

work closely with IBM account teams

to meet our mutual clients' Enterprise

Data Management needs.

For more information contact:

Marc Hebert,

Estuate’s COO

marc@estuate.com

T: 510-468-7132