Large National Restaurant Chain

RDB Concepts have supported this major high-street name with our RDB Manage and Custodian*24 services for more than 10 years. We have undertaken several estate optimisation projects for them. Most recently as part of our contribution to their COVID– 19 cost cutting programs we suggested a significant optimisation which saved them a staggering 90% on their Oracle DB licence OpEx costs annually.

The database optimisation was combined with a wholesale change of suppliers in their hosting and networks. By making clever use of their IBM Power8 Servers to reduce licence costs for the Oracle DB Enterprise Edition running Micros/Oracle Hospitality.

We had incrementally reduced their Oracle DB EE costs over the preceding years from 32 CPUs to 12 CPUs and then finally to 8 CPUs. In the end we were able to migrate the whole application to Oracle DB SE and make a final saving of 90%.

 

 

Key Objectives

  1. Fix the current issue with the legacy environment:
    • The client wanted to sweat the asset for a number of years and had no appetite to invest in streamlining or upgrading anything
  2. Provide a Full-Resolving Business as Usual service which guaranteed performance and uptime without incremental costs for fixes etc.
    • The client had needed RDB Concepts’ help because the skills gap and resource internally was not able to provide the service levels the business required
    • RDB Concepts have a broad skillset which spans legacy to current enterprise technology and so was able to fill that gap for the client. The costs were less than a full time equivalent resource but provided a proactive team on a 24×7 basis

Key Benefits

The key benefit was providing continuity of service at a high level, while undertaking complex downgrading and migration of a core application.

  1. Saving the customer a significant Operating Cost for the life of the application.
  2. Providing continuity of service at a high level, while undertaking complex downgrading and migration of a core application.
  3. Navigating the start-stop nature of doing business during COVID lockdowns, boom and bust activity profile.
  
   

Outcomes

Bringing together our core services

In this project we needed to use a number of our core services:

  • Respond to the client’s commercial pressure caused by COVID–19. They were willing to try anything to reduce OpE
  • Comprehensively review their entire estate without regard to our commercial position and produce the best possible plan for the custome
  • Test our proposal to run Oracle Hospitality on Oracle DB Standard Edition rather than the much more expensive Enterprise Edition. This involved changing certain aspects of the Oracle Database to provide workarounds where Enterprise features were used by the application
  • Migrate and fully test the new much cheaper environment
  • Help them successfully argue the case with Oracle when inevitably, their estate was audited by Oracle.
    

The Solution

What type of businesses benefit from this type of solution?

In this instance, a client developed an increased appetite for change brought about by the devastating effect that COVID-19 had on the hospitality industry. Rather than protect our turf, RDB Concepts responded with radical suggestions which saved the client significant operational costs, and used the lower level of business activity to get the proof of concept, migrations and testing all done in time for reopening.

Of course, we make recommendations about possible optimisations as and when they become relevant and available to customers, but often these changes are not priorities. This emergency made that change critical to survival.

Because RDB Concepts works for the client and is not commercially invested in technology choices, we can give our clients the best, impartial advice based on all of the options.

 

RDB Concepts currently offers ongoing 24×7 DBA and sysadmin services to this customer, and has done so for more than a decade. We believe in loyalty to our customers first and foremost.