Whitepaper: Hybrid project makes OCI history

Maurice’s is a women’s fashion retailer and online vendor that was being spun off from its parent company, Ascena.  The challenge faced was to support the migration of a range of applications (like EBS, SOA, EPM, Fusion, Hyperion, WebCenter) from the parent company and make it a single instance on a target platform for use by Maurice’s.  

This required a fair bit of juggling as the systems had intertwined dependencies between each other and the parent company.

Maurice’s knew that a new platform was needed as they would no longer have access to the parent’s datacenter.   That was the set-up for an integrated proposal to move everything to OCI.  Even though it was the first time for Maurice’s IT organization to use cloud technologies, the client agreed that it was a viable solution that suited their business needs.  Plus, they were able to bring their own licences.

iArch Solutions was brought in by the Oracle team to deliver the implementation components for EPM and Hyperion.  The Hyperion applications were spun off and moved to the greenfield OCI based instances with the migration of all non-prod environments and the setup of a DR followed two months later by June ’21.    

In the third week of June ’21 on the way to a planned GO LIVE in August ’21, the client informed the project team that they had to pause the project due to other third-party applications (that were not in scope for the initial OCI move) required for the full integration were not ready to join the cloud journey.  

iArch Solutions and the Oracle team had to leave the system intact for 6 months and move on until the client advised us in early January ’22, they would be ready for cutover in February or March of this 2022.  By then, the original work done by our team had to be repatched and re-validated.  We also had to rebuild the entire PROD and synch the DR as the technology in OCI had been improved and we could leverage additional built-in functionality for syncing between regions.

Everyone on the team was in different places and we had to pull together to deal with both the technical and communication complexities.  But in the end, we made history as this was the first hybrid deal where iArch Solutions (a certified Oracle Cloud Services partner), Oracle’s Cloud Lift and Oracle Consulting teams joined forces to deliver the full solution.  

Bottom line – the project was completed in less time than anticipated thanks to the great team effort and despite a lot of resource changes.  The client was satisfied that the project team performed “above and beyond” the call of duty. More cloud consumption took place when the project restarted which was financially beneficial and there appears to be more work ahead with the client.  Any day of the week (and maybe twice on Sundays), that’s what you can call AWESOME!