Marketing services provider Alliance Data Systems is saving over $1 million annually, thanks to its decision to migrate a key human resources (HR) application and supporting software from its physical data center to the cloud.
 
Alliance Data Systems, headquartered in Plano, Texas, is a publicly traded customer loyalty and marketing services company with more than 20,000 employees and a market value of approximately $11.5 billion.
 
Alliance Data Systems focuses on three main lines of business: Alliance Data Card Services, which manages credit card programs for companies like Pottery Barn, Walgreens, and many others; LoyaltyOne, which helps companies implement customer loyalty programs; and Epsilon, which offers a wide range of marketing services.
 
The company's journey to the cloud began when it became clear that costs related to leasing its on-premises data center were rising fast. They were also experiencing significant challenges related to the performance and reliability of the data center hardware—and its relationship with the data center provider was bumpy at best. At the same time, slow server provisioning times were hurting the company's ability to quickly respond to changing business needs.
 
That's when Alliance Data Systems started to think about leaving its physical data center behind and migrating its HR implementation—which includes Oracle PeopleSoft and several supporting solutions—to the cloud.
 
Scoping the cloud migration project
To accommodate its focus on customers in the banking and finance industry, Alliance Data Systems chose to move its entire HR infrastructure to the cloud. They determined that moving its infrastructure to the cloud could potentially lead to several benefits, including:

• Improved performance and efficiency gains
• Greater scalability and flexibility
• Reduced costs

As an added bonus, a move to the cloud would eliminate the challenges Alliance Data Systems faced working with its data center provider.
 
Once the decision was made, the next step was to choose a cloud provider. They ultimately chose to migrate to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
 
A closer look at Alliance Data Systems' cloud migration strategy
Alliance Data Systems chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure in part because it has been an Oracle customer for many years and the company saw value in running Oracle software on Oracle's infrastructure. Alliance Data Systems uses Oracle PeopleSoft to manage human resources for all employees as well as for financials. It uses the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle PeopleSoft for reporting, forecasting, and planning. And all of its Oracle applications run on Exadata—Oracle's high-performance database solution. All of these systems needed to be moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
 
Alliance Data Systems' IT team worked closely with a third-party consultant, LTI, and the Oracle support team throughout the project to design and execute a cloud migration plan without disrupting the business or causing unplanned downtime. The goal was to complete the project within a tight timeframe.
 
All told, 30 databases and 25 terabytes of critical financial and HR data from three quarter racks of Exadata on-premises were quickly and securely transferred to Oracle's cloud. Today, Alliance Data Systems runs six environments for Oracle PeopleSoft in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, including development, Q/A, user acceptance testing, disaster recovery, production, and certification.
 
As part of the migration, Alliance Data Systems upgraded to the latest versions of its Oracle applications. The project took a total of six months from contract negotiation to go-live.
 
Demonstrable results
One of the major benefits of the project is that Alliance Data Systems now has greater freedom to quickly scale up its computing resources during periods of high demand, and then scale back down again when spikes in demand level off.
 
The move to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure eliminated the data center management problems. But it also enabled the company to replace three on-premises Exadata quarter with two cloud-based racks, further adding to the cost savings.
 
"We achieved between 30% and 50% increased performance and we doubled our disk space. We actually have five times more memory and then three times the CPU," said Nickoria Johnson, Senior Director of IT Planning and Applications at Alliance Data Systems. "We are very excited about the ongoing evolution and ongoing optimization opportunities we have."
 
Key lessons learned
Johnson said the process of carrying out the HR migration strategy highlighted some valuable lessons that can help make projects like these go smoothly.
 
For starters, it's important to partner with key company leaders and stakeholders, get their buy-in, and keep them informed during every step of a cloud migration project. But it's also important to keep customers informed, particularly for companies that keep sensitive customers information in the cloud. If needed, it's a good idea to educate customers about the value and benefits of cloud computing.
 
Alliance Data Systems took several steps to make sure that customers understood that the Oracle cloud is securely featured, and that having Oracle applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure allows for consistency and reliability.
 
In the end, the move to the cloud made Alliance Data Systems more agile and flexible, and as a result the company can serve its customers more effectively. For those running HR applications on premises, Johnson recommends that you consider a cloud migration project.