Overview 

Faced with rapid growth and evolving business needs, a retail company transformed its IT infrastructure using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. The solution, developed with Path and Oracle, improved application availability, scalability, and operational efficiency while optimizing costs. It is being rolled out to all 1,200 stores. 

Challenges 

With operations spread across the region, exponential growth plans, and changing business model (in-store and e-commerce) ensuring availability of its core retail, supply chain, and warehouse applications 24×7 was the key business requirement. 

This called for transforming its core business applications in a manner they support the evolving business needs and priorities, that are: 

  • Availability (24×7) and performance. 
  • Time to market – make of store operational  
  • Cost – optimize per store/per transaction.   
  • Business continuity. 

Our Approach 

After a detailed assessment of the customer requirement and discussion with business leaders, after considering available options of Private/Public Cloud – the pros and cons of each option were weighed on business outcomes and technology. Path in collaboration with Oracle Cloud and Application specialist the future deployment architecture leveraging Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) was devised, with the following services from OCI:  

  • Oracle Database Cloud Service and  
  • Real Application Cluster Services for High Availability 
  • Retail Xstore Office application 
  • Oracle Retail Customer Engagement application 
  • Load balancer to extend high availability solution for Retail Xstore Office application 
  • Oracle data guard for DR 
  • Oracle WebLogic environment setup and configuration for Oracle Retail Customer Engagement application 
  • VPN setup for secure connection from backend to the application and database OCI environment 

Results 

The successful service implementation and managed services provided by Path, the end customer started using the apps on OCI to pilot in 10 stores and aim to implement to all 1200 stores as part of the roadmap. They trust Path to expand new workload to set up of DR for business continuity.  

The consumption has grown steadily and consistently over the past couple of months during the Customer’s expansion venture. Path Infotech is now also providing annual support services for managing OCI, Middleware Infrastructure and Oracle Databases for the Customer.  

Benefits 

Some of the benefits experienced by them are: –   

  • 35% optimization in Application performance 
  • Lower IT costs and improved application deployment with better cloud performance 
  • Highly scalable environment for future workload increase  
  • Delivered better operational efficiency and minimized system stability issues 
  • Ensured availability of business-critical applications during any disaster situation 
  • Better planning, management, and monitoring of cost expenditure