At BLUEPRINT 4D 2024, Hasan Usmani of the Market Programs Team at Oracle and Dave Geoffrion, JD Edwards Cloud Architect Specialist at Oracle, presented compelling reasons to migrate to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). By leveraging Oracle’s digital modernization, you can extend and transform your current JD Edwards with OCI. In this article, you’ll find more information on the benefits of OCI and AI-enabled applications for JD Edwards.

Today, businesses are investing in digital modernization.

According to the numbers:

• 80% of businesses are planning strategic moves that require IT modernization
• 60% of large businesses are moving IT functions to the cloud
• 50% of in-house applications, however, are still on-premises

If SaaS is a longer-term strategy, a “move -and-improve” or extension to OCI initiative can deliver many cloud benefits immediately.

The image below shows a small sample of the many JD Edwards customers utilizing OCI:

OCI is designed to meet you where you are and support what’s next. It provides the fastest time-to-value while optimizing total cost of ownership (TCO) across any modernization strategy.

With OCI, you’ll see major improvements in several areas:

• Migration is easier with infrastructure designed to support enterprise apps and unique tooling and automation
• Optimization of your apps with more automation and resilience, simpler integrations, and enhanced security
• Innovation helps your business adapt with powerful solutions like AI, analytics, and seamless transitions to SaaS

You can start experiencing these benefits without any application changes on OCI.

Reduce Your TCO

Specific to migration, OCI empowers you to reduce TCO by paying for what you actually consume. OCI, unlike other providers, lets you select the number of cores and memory to match your workload needs for an average annual cost savings of up to 60% with fully customizable instances.

In terms of automation, unique migration and provisioning tools help you to streamline deployment, migration, and maintenance of your JD Edwards applications with One-Click Provisioning on OCI.

You can save more on your application through Oracle Cloud-specific discounts. Oracle Support Rewards, Universal Credits, and BYOL programs protect your existing investments and help you to save more. Customers have already redeemed $178 million through Support Rewards alone.

Another advantage of OCI is the help available for lifting into the Cloud. Oracle cloud engineers can help with planning, architecting prototyping, and managing cloud migrations. Clients can migrate critical workloads in weeks—sometimes days—instead of months.

The example below shows the cost savings available for customers who move to OCI:

In the image, you can see that the overall capacity usage is much closer to a 65-unit capacity than the 130-unit capacity of On-Prem usage.

TruGreen’s Reduced TCO by up to 40% and Sped Performance by up to 5x

For a real-life example, TruGreen is the largest lawn-care provider in the United States. The company serves more than 2.3 million residential and commercial customers. When it spun off from its parent company, ServiceMaster, TruGreen’s IT staff knew they needed to modernize their legacy JD Edwards system to address processes which were disjointed, obsolete, and unsupported at every layer.

By migrating to OCI, TruGreen achieved 4–5x faster performance for their JD Edwards processes. The Director of Corporate Systems at TruGreen explained the success of their migration with these words, “Our finance and branch teams that use JD Edwards are just ecstatic over the performance. They can run financial reports and manage distribution tasks faster than ever.”

TruGreen worked with Oracle partner Velocity Technology Solutions to adopt a hybrid cloud approach. TruGreen archived its historical data in Velocity’s private cloud while implementing JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2 on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure using both the Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Platform-as-a-Service products. In doing so they achieved the following results:

• Leveraged Oracle’s API and Velocity’s Cloud Application Management Platform™ to deploy the new JD Edwards environment quickly, leading to immediate cost and user benefits
• Achieved an immediate 30–40% reduction in TCO and 4–5x faster performance
• Developed critical new functionalities for its JD Edwards environment while streamlining processes for disperse lines of business
• Gained stronger security with virtual cloud network and separate subnets to isolate private and public resources

Single Vendor for the Full Stack

JD Edwards runs best on OCI as a single vendor for the full stack. JD Edwards was tested and certified on OCI, not on other public clouds. Because of this, OCI can be certified as a stable platform.

The JDE and OCI teams work closely to resolve any issues within their single vendor support offering. Another benefit of the collaboration between Oracle teams is roadmap alignment with visibility across the board, leading to fine-tuning of JD Edwards for optimal performance on OCI.

The best OCI innovations and services for Oracle applications are available for OCI users. Some of these include Oracle Linux, Autonomous and Exadata Database Cloud Services, AI/ML Services and Accelerators, and Full Stack Observability and Management.

End-to-End Security & Compliance

There is end-to-end security and compliance which includes always-on encryption. Plus, the comprehensive service level agreements for availability, manageability, and performance are unmatched in the industry. Furthermore, there is no reskilling required for end-users and IT staff.

When you migrate to OCI, you are optimizing performance, availability, manageability, and security. You can get more from your existing systems and data including increased efficiency, business continuity and resilience, enhanced security, and new application use cases.

Autonomous database leverages the phenomenal performance of Exadata platform in the Cloud. Performance statistics show it is 50x faster than anything in any other Cloud for any Oracle database. It uses Machine Learning (ML) to automate database patching, security backups, and other routine tasks that have traditionally been assigned to DBA tasks.

Autonomous database is self-driving, self-securing, and self-repairing—which can save you 63% in operational costs and 45% in infrastructure costs.

Examples of the automated processes are:

• Automated patching and security
• Automated scaling
• Automated backups
• Automated provisioning
• Automated configuration
• Automated tuning

OCI also optimizes your resilience by offering Full Stack Disaster Recovery (FSDR) with one click. It manages the transition of infrastructure, platform, and applications between OCI regions around the globe. You can keep business operations running during planned maintenance and quickly recover enterprise applications after an unplanned outage at the touch of a single button with the OCI Console. Cost savings of FSDR come out to 56% more affordable than on-prem and 50% faster deployment.

OCI’s security-first architecture offers a full stack of security capabilities. Encryption is always on. There are easy defaults for developing and running apps. There are also prescriptive approaches with policies to enforce security posture and automated baseline management. OCI security is integrated with Unified Security and Identity across IaaS and SaaS. There’s no compromise for security—the included security eliminates the cost and security tradeoff.

Below is a graphic outlining these capabilities:

Integration Leader

Oracle is a leader in integration for application, data, and service connectivity. With more than 150 prebuilt adapters and recipes, customers achieve 4x–6x faster business outcomes and 30–60% in cost savings.

AI-Enabled Apps, Chat Bots & Business Insights

AI/ML is the new engine that is turbocharging many new innovations across analytics, digital assistance, and intelligent workflows.

There are many ready-to-deploy AI services on OCI. Pre-built ML models make it easier for developers to apply AI to applications and business operations using APIs and software development kits.

You can enhance your JDE applications with these ready-made AI capabilities, meaning you can add intelligence to applications quickly with pre-trained services.

Below are 5 examples of AI-enabled capabilities:

• Document Understanding enables developers to extract text, tables, and other key data from document files.
• Vision uses deep learning to detect and classify objects in images.
• Language performs sophisticated text analysis, including sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction.
• Speech transcribes voice, creates subtitling, and generates metadata.
• The Digital Assistant helps users accomplish tasks in natural language conversations.

While the AI services, themselves, are OCI-based, the applications you’re surrounding with these features do not have to be in OCI.

Use Case for AI/ML Accelerator

In terms of a use case for AI-enabled services, the OCI AI/ML accelerator helps answer manufacturing questions that operation reports and BI systems can’t. If the standard operational reports deliver a “WHAT” analysis:

21% of work orders of strawberry jam made between Jan. 1 and May 31 had consistency above upper limit at operation 50.

The OCI AI/ML Apps Accelerator returns the “WHY” analysis:

21% of work orders of strawberry jam made between Jan. 1 and May 31 had consistency above upper limit at operation 50 when:

• Operator was David Cooper @ Op 10
• Batch was made during 2nd shift
• Sugar quantity usage was between 10.2 and 10.7 lbs.
• Sugar lot supplier was “White Crystals Inc.”
• Blender max speed was 590 RPM @ Op 20
• Oven average temperature was above 350°F @ Op 30

The accelerator checks for patterns, correlation, and top influencing factors to identify and predict issues.

The Oracle Digital Assistant is an AI/Gen AI powered digital assistant for your Oracle applications. The graphic below shows the robust set of capabilities available through ODA:

Oracle’s modern data platform comprised of Oracle Analytics Cloud and Autonomous Database offers fresh business insights for new revenue and cost reductions. Businesses leveraging Oracle’s modern platform are experiencing:

• Growth with new revenue streams
• Better real-time forecasts and automated processes
• Reduced operational costs with automation and preventative maintenance
• Better customer and employee engagement and retention

Pro Tip

If you want to experience non-disruptive transformation, OCI is the only provider that can seamlessly take you from JD Edwards On-Prem to modernized SaaS.

To learn more, view the full presentation from BLUEPRINT 4D 2024.