University faced with losing their ERP after a government agency purchase agreement expires
Industry: Education
Company Type: University
The Challenge
The university faced losing its Oracle Database license after decades of use when its government agency purchase agreement expired. The substantial, upfront cost to purchase an on-premises database had not been budgeted. An application “eco-system” utilized by the Finance Department, the Dept of Student Services, faculty members and students required a solution quickly.
The Discovery
Boston BizTech discovered that the government agency that manages the master contract for the university had allowed the license to expire. The Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system runs on the Oracle Database product, but Oracle could not transfer the license from one entity to another. The upfront, one-time purchase of the Oracle Database on-premises license was greater than the annual operating budget that supported enterprise applications for the university.
The Solution
Boston BizTech brought the negotiations and management of the new Oracle contract in-house. We negotiated a 3-year commitment for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, thus eliminating the upfront cost. We migrated the Oracle Database and the entire ERP platform from on-premises to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
The Impact
The university gained improved functionality and resiliency. This allowed the university to better manage disaster recovery and business continuity planning by deploying a region-redundant standby production database. While the university had unique circumstances, with thorough discovery and analysis we were able to implement a cost-effective public cloud solution that fit their budgetary constraints and met their implementation requirements. With our guidance, the university gained a comprehensive solution that increased the university’s sovereignty over their contracts, and increased performance and availability of the platform. It also provided geographic redundancy that had been impossible under the previous on-premises solution.