Schiphol migrates E-Business Suite to Oracle IaaS as a stepping stone towards SaaS

Schiphol is one of Europe's largest airports and is constantly working to strengthen its position as such. As part of this effort, the airport has developed an IT strategy that heavily relies on Cloud technology. Schiphol used the ERP application Oracle E-Business suite (EBS) for accounting purposes. As part of the IT strategy, Schiphol was aiming to migrate the functionality of the old on-premise EBS application to Oracle Fusion Apps, a Software as a Service (SaaS) model application from Oracle.

Schiphol and Sopra Steria envisioned that this SaaS migration would not be a so called big bang. This would be a project where over time the E-business suite would be gradually scaled down. However, both its usage and volume could still increase in the meantime. Oracle Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provided a good answer to these uncertainties with its seemingly unlimited flexibility in both performance and storage.

Migration from on-premise to IaaS

Sopra Steria migrated Schiphol's Oracle E-Business Suite from an on-premise environment to Oracle IaaS, using the "move & always improve" method. Contrary to the older “Lift & Shift” method this method involved implementing an inventory of technical wishes that could be easily fulfilled using Cloud products. By migrating to Oracle IaaS, Schiphol was able to scale its application's capacity at any time based on organizational needs. Sopra Steria was able to keep supplying Schiphol with high percentage uptime, few incidents and great performance. This meant that Schiphol could gradually reduce the size of its EBS platform after the SaaS migration of each individual module.

The benefits

The hardware in the cloud, which doesn't need to be purchased upfront, is more modern, technically superior, and proven to be more stable. This means that Schiphol spends less time on the EBS environment because fewer incidents arise regarding continuity, security, and reliability. This improved level of support by Sopra Steria has enabled Schiphol to focus more resources on implementing SaaS solutions. Allowing Schiphol to optimally benefit from the advantages of Cloud computing while continuing to innovate. Less effort spend on the older environment meant Schiphol could shift its focus to the implementation of the future. Together, these developments have made Schiphol better able to meet the needs of the organization and customer, and enhance its competitive position.