Archiving your Oracle E-Business Suite

In the new world of Oracle Cloud, many companies are re-assessing their requirements for Oracle solutions and a number have taken the decision to move their systems to alternative platforms rather than taking the leap into the Oracle Cloud world. For many of these customers, there are statutory requirements to retain historical data, typically 7 years’ worth.

The Problem

This can be problematic, who wants to gum up their shiny new system with old data? Similarly, who wants to delay and complicate the implementation of their new system by working out how to migrate historical data into that new system? – It seems sensible therefore to retain some sort of archived version of the old system to satisfy the data retention requirement.

How can this be done with the minimum of effort, fuss and cost?

No one wants to expend undue energy to manage and support an environment which ultimately has the writing on the wall! We at Claremont have devised a suite of solutions where this can be achieved simply and cost-effectively to relieve this headache and provide peace of mind that the data is safe, allowing companies to forge ahead in their new world.

The Solutions

Claremont provides three main options for archiving an old E-Business Suite environment.

1. Simply take a backup of your solution and store this offline.
2. Take a full copy of the environment and run it on “downsized” hardware.
3. Take a copy of the data and provide an alternate “reporting front end”.

Option 1 here is the cheapest option and may well tick the boxes for some companies, but crucially the issue with this is that accessing the data to run reports is problematic.  The environment would need to be restored at each point in time when data is required.  This option is largely discounted by most organisations who typically require access to the data, at least initially while they transact their first year or so in their new solution.

Options 2 and 3 provide pros and cons and are covered in more detail in this blog.

E-Business Suite Clone

In this scenario (Option 2) we simply take a clone of the E-Business Suite environment and create a “downsized” environment in our Claremont Cloud.  This provides multiple benefits:

• Downsized environment reduces hardware costs.
• Cloud hosting removes the requirement to manage hardware refreshes.
• Retaining the E-Business Suite application provides access to Oracle’s native reports.
• Removes potential for customised business processes to “confuse” reporting.

The downside of this solution comes by way of licensing.  The retention of the E-Business Suite application means that the customer will still require this to be licensed. The customer can stop paying for Oracle support and use Claremont services to provide for this, which does reduce the spend with Oracle, yet the environment will remain licensable.

The downsizing of the environment here is critical, the number of CPUs remaining in the environment will dictate the licensing requirement.

Many customers however have purchased perpetual licenses from Oracle, and in this instance, regardless as to the size of the environment is already licensed and therefore there is no saving to be gained by restructuring the environment and the cost savings are in hardware resource/support and in dropping Oracle Support.

Archived Reporting Environment

In this scenario (Option 3) we start with the same premise as before – we take a copy of the environment, downsize, and host it in Claremont Cloud. This provides the same benefits as before from the perspective of hardware support, reduced hosting costs and the ability to drop Oracle Support from the equation.

The crucial difference here is the removal of the E-Business Suite front end.  This removal reduces the requirement to license the application.  At Claremont, we also possess extensive Oracle APEX expertise, enabling seamless integration with Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) for enhanced functionality and data accessibility.

In addition to this, as part of the transition project to build this reporting environment, we at Claremont can extract the data from the Oracle Enterprise Edition E-Business Suite database and import it into a new Standard Edition Oracle Database.  This drastically reduces the license cost of this database, Oracle’s list price for an Enterprise Edition processor license is $47,500, whereas, for the Standard edition, it's $17,500.

Conclusion

Customers looking to archive their E-Business Suite environments have multiple options to consider.  The key drivers in this scenario are the ability to retain access to the archived data and to reduce costs as far as possible/practicable.

At Claremont, we've designed solutions to provide simple, cost-effective options to provide archived environments with the minimum of fuss and the maximum cost efficiency whilst providing the peace of mind that the data is being managed and maintained.

Our expertise in supporting E-Business suite and knowledge in Oracle APEX ensures that the solutions remain robust and allow organisations moving away from Oracle E-Business Suite to move forward without their archived solution weighing them down.

Useful Resources

Oracle E-Business Suite Archive Managed Services 

The Solution to Archiving Computer Systems

Choosing the right Archiving Provider

If you are looking for an Oracle partner who can help you with Archiving Oracle E-Business, goes about it the right way and can back up the talk, then contact us. And if you would like to find out more about Oracle Archiving Managed Services with Claremont or have a question, you can email us at info@claremont.co.uk or phone us on +44 (0) 1483 549004.