Quest recently spoke with Neeraj Korepal, General Manager -Corporate IT, at Neterwala Group of Companies, about the company’s Lift and Shift from on-premise to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Key Takeaways

About Neterwala Group of Companies

The Neterwala Group is a professionally run and managed business enterprise with over six decades of steadfast growth. The group is technologically robust with diverse manufacturing interests in Metallurgy, Software, Specialty Chemicals, Engineering, Geology, Oil and Gas and Environment.

The metallurgy industry forms the founding pillar of Neterwala Group in Aerospace and other industrial sectors.

The company is a leading provider of onshore and offshore mud logging services, Airborne Exploration, rig instrumentation, mineral exploration, groundwater exploration and surveying for environmental and/or engineering applications to Indian and international players in the Oil and Gas exploration sector.

Visit Neterwala’s Website

What is the history of JD Edwards at Neterwala?

We implemented JD Edwards EnterpriseOne release 8.9 in 2005 running the AS/400 with the DB2 Database. We then upgraded to release 9.2 in 2016. We are on Tools release 9.2.3.3.

What JD Edwards Applications are you running?

Neterwala is running:

1. JDE EnterpriseOne Advanced Pricing
2. JDE EnterpriseOne Service Management Foundation
3. JDE EnterpriseOne Sales Order Management
4. JDE EnterpriseOne Capital Asset Management
5. JDE EnterpriseOne Resource Assignment
6. JDE EnterpriseOne Financials
7. JDE EnterpriseOne System Foundation
8. JDE EnterpriseOne Inventory Management
9. JDE EnterpriseOne Manufacturing Management
10. JDE EnterpriseOne Quality Management
11. JDE EnterpriseOne Requirements Planning
12. JDE EnterpriseOne Procurement and Subcontract Management

What were the drivers for switching from AS400 on-premise to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure?

Some of the drivers behind switching to OCI included:

• Much greater resiliency in the primary datacenter than is possible on-premises
• Rapid in-place technology refresh and patching
• Proactive costs and usage monitoring
• Near-instant scaling up or down
• Federated identity with your existing systems
• Fast provisioning time for new JD Edwards environments
• Beyond the benefits of being straightforward to migrate, easier to manage, and more flexible to scale, a JD Edwards implementation on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is 50 percent less than on-premises or even on another cloud provider.

What was the process and the outcome of the project? How long did it take? Did you have a business partner assist?

We did a Lift and Shift from on-premise to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. We moved from AS400/DB2 to Oracle Linux/Oracle DB. We followed the process of transferring on-premise DB2 data to cloud Oracle database using the Golden Gate tool. During go-live, only differential data was needed to transfer hence downtime was less. This process got completed in six weeks and there were small hiccups, but everything is well which ends well. The 9EDGE team assisted us in this migration, and they have a pool of Oracle certified resources who carried out this migration.

What benefits are you realizing on OCI?

The benefits of moving to the cloud are quite good. We can scale up and scale down our resources. We can add or remove an extra CPU using one-click provisioning. We can monitor our usage and billing on a dashboard. The One-Click Provisioning console also allows us to deploy JD Edwards EnterpriseOne on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in three simple steps:

1. Configure
2. Orchestrate
3. Deploy

We simply configure server manager details, create a deployment plan, and initiate scripts for automated provisioning.

We are also seeing improved system performance. Integrations to other cloud solutions like Salesforce, AWS, etc. will be easier. Also, easy interfacing opportunities open with IoT and other emerging technologies with Cloud.

What are your future plans?

About our future on the Cloud, we are thinking of using the ADW, Autonomous Data Warehousing tool, which would help us to generate various MIS reports on the fly. Also, we are looking at CRM for our sales and service teams in the group.