$36B AUM Investment Firm optimizes Oracle estate while gaining performance
With the Oracle database running OCI and applications running Azure, the ESB applications of one of the largest investment management companies in India were suffering from poor performance, unexpectedly high CPU utilization, and as a result high Oracle license costs. With the advent of Tessell's Oracle PaaS on Azure, it was a slam-dunk decision for the customer to move their Oracle workloads right next to their applications.
50%
Optimization of Oracle licenses
40%
Faster DB query runtimes
100%
SEBI Cloud Adoption Compliance
The Company
Approaching its 150-year founding anniversary, our client stands as one of the oldest investment firms globally with over 36 Billion dollars in assets under management. Today the firm operates as a subsidiary of a $100 Billion dollar publicly traded conglomerate. The investment management firm delivers mutual fund services to individual and institutional investors alike. Looking to the next century of growth, the company has adopted a digital-first strategy. The firm’s strategic focus is in the creation of an omnichannel technology platform that will grow to serve 90% of its business operations. The start was shaky, the end-user experience was challenged by end-to-end performance issues, and frequent connection drops impacted the delivery of data to both mobile and web applications.
The Business-Technology Challenge
The digital application REST APIs for the Website, iOS, and Android encountered sluggish performance, and connection drops, and resulted in a subpar customer experience. The Oracle Landscape on Oracle Cloud and ESB app servers on Azure led to connectivity challenges, resulting in user dissatisfaction and complaints.
The firm’s IT swat team traced the performance issues across the multi-cloud service architecture. The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which was hosted in Azure and applications services calls to ESB traversed the internet from alternative clouds. Multiple network hops resulted in slow application response and page load times. No dedicated quality of service across the network meant that the poor end-user experience took place both intermittently and irregularly. The investigative process revealed the complexity of root cause diagnostic analysis of managing applications across multiple clouds. The result was a long time-to-problem resolution and an undesirable business impact.
Accelerated Product Creation: An Open Finance Strategy
In the growing Digital Economy, seamless integration with 3rd party fintech platforms is crucial for new product creation. The company struggled to scale its digital plan for onboarding at least 95% of new customers via digital channels. Making financial information and data accessible, shareable, and usable both internally and by various entities within the broader financial ecosystem is a central tenant to open finance. There were a number of technical challenges impeding the business including:
1. Application Response
Without a regional dedicated connection between OCI and Azure, the network route required multiple hops, firewalls, and switches, resulting in slow API response times.
2. Compliance Requirements & Regulatory Sign Off
Regulatory mandates require the asset management firm to attest to control over and the protection of their IT infrastructure. These requirements include hardened OS Images, DB configurations, Database Identity Access Management (DAM), Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) agents, and specific auditing requirements.
3. No Host-Colocated Database Service on OCI
Additionally, the existence of two databases on different servers, interacting via a DB link, previously did not work well and led to high network wait times. The complexity of refactoring the application to reduce wait times was deemed prolonged and complex.
4. Software License Costs
In addition to the architectural benefits, Seeking to optimize license costs and increase hardware/software asset utilization, the company aimed to increase the database density and increase resource utilization by having both databases on the same server.
5. Long Term Backup Retention
The nature of its business demands from the customer that it should store the data for long-term retention with specific data retention SLAs - 7 daily, 4 weekly, 12 monthly, and 8 yearly backups. Maintaining this was a challenging task for the customer.
The Solution
The company chose Tessell for Oracle in Azure to host their Oracle database estate to achieve an optimal end-user experience. Application and Database are now in close proximity.
1. Oracle Databases as a Managed Service
Tessell provides the firm with fully managed Oracle databases on Azure with enterprise-grade data protection, security, and compliance. This offers flexibility in bringing the database technology stack to achieve unified management, security, and compliance across on-premises and the cloud.
2. Tessell Consolidation Service
Deploying both databases on the same server eliminated networking lag while optimizing licensing requirements and improving resource utilization.
3. Seamless SharePlex Integration
Tessell facilitated seamless SharePlex integration, aiding a smooth migration.
4. Advanced SLA Management
Tessell allows admins to create custom SLAs for a long-term data retention perspective. This allowed the customer to set a schedule for which days, months, and years they wanted to retain backups.
The Results
- Improved throughput: Achieved an immediate 40% Improvement in DB query run times without any refactoring.
- Improved API Response time: Digital Apps experienced a 30% improvement in run times, reducing from an average of 3.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds.
- 50% Optimization in CPU: Supporting similar loads with 50% less CPU usage, resulting in a significant reduction in Oracle license costs.