Yarra Valley Water (YVW) has implemented an Oracle Engineered Systems infrastructure to provide a standardized IT architecture aimed at helping the utility to improve business systems performance, achieve a better ROI and enhance customer service. The water provider is using Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, an engineered system for running business applications and the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, to consolidate its core systems and run its Oracle software. This includes Oracle Utilities Customer Care & Billing, which helps YVW manage 700,000 customer accounts, as well as Oracle’s Primavera Enterprise Project Portfolio Management, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition 11g, Oracle WebCenter and Oracle WebCenter Content for its website and intranet portal.
Owned by the Victorian State Government (Australia), YVW is the largest of Melbourne’s three water retail businesses. It provides water supply and sewerage services to over 1.7 million people and over 50,000 businesses in Melbourne’s northern and eastern suburbs, including some recycled water and trade waste customers.
Yarra Valley Water went live with Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata in May 2012, coinciding with an upgrade of the Oracle Utilities Customer Care & Billing and Oracle Business Intelligence systems. The purchase of the Engineered Systems platform was made in December 2011.
According to Leigh Berrell, CIO, Yarra Valley Water, Oracle Exalogic was attractive because it allowed YVW to focus more on the business applications than the technology and infrastructure. The water company now has two paired boxes to manage, rather than 12 disparate pieces of infrastructure requiring different skills sets.
“Because the systems are engineered to work together it is a very efficient way to implement IT - it takes most of the design work out – and we are definitely seeing the benefits of running Oracle software on Oracle hardware. We are very happy with the results, and will further develop our private cloud strategy around the Oracle platform,” says Leigh Berrell, CIO, Yarra Valley Water.
The deployment is credited with enabling significant performance gains. For example, the use of Oracle Exalogic for YVW’s business critical billing and customer management application has helped it reduce application response times from up-to-nine seconds to sub-seconds. In the data center, as a result of the use of Oracle Exadata, regular overnight re-indexing of the data warehouse, which previously took 8 hours, now takes approximately one hour; and a complete re-indexing/re-build, which covers 6 applications, now takes around 3.5 hours instead of 24 hours.
Complete details of the YVW deployment are available in the Oracle case study here.