The News: Last week, Oracle showcased successfully migrating Loblaw’s extensive SAP system to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), improving key transactions by 35%. See the complete Press Release on Loblaw’s migration at Oracle.com.
Navigating Complex SAP Migrations: Oracle’s Triumph with Loblaw
Analyst Take: Let us set aside for the moment the remarkable phenomenon of a world-leading enterprise application vendor featuring one of its archrivals in a press release. After all, Oracle Executive Chairman and Founder Larry Ellison seems to be in quite the giving mood lately. As anyone who has worked on even a modest SAP migration knows, the software components are so independent and the systems are so performance-sensitive that these initiatives are fraught, costly, and time-consuming. These challenges remain despite many years of laudable significant investment by SAP in technologies, tools, and partners to ease transformation and upgrade lifecycles.
But Loblaw’s SAP implementation is hardly a modest one: 180 TB is not the biggest SAP database we have ever heard of by any stretch, but once you hit around 100 TB, it hardly matters. Performance becomes an almost trivial problem compared with availability, replication, continuity, auditing, and environment management. This data is the lifeblood of a sprawling, multifaceted business we are talking about, and though details are understandably lacking as to how the migration was performed, it is doubtful that more than a weekend’s outage of the system was allowed as it moved to OCI.
Oracle’s Infrastructure Chops
From our perspective, the Loblaw example is highly instructive as to how IT shops should assess, or perhaps reassess, Oracle’s potential place in their vendor lineup. Oracle’s obsession with UX and CX has long made it a full-stack solution vendor, extensively developing hardware and system engineering expertise to serve its leading software engineering capabilities. This strategy and proficiency have translated to OCI, and given that this product is now the cloud rather than discrete systems—not to be dense about it—Oracle excellence in infrastructure can be bought and used directly by all comers.
Sure, OCI works best for Oracle Applications and Fusion customers because of its extensive vertical integrations in the Oracle stack. (We leave out Oracle Database customers because Database has been quite commonly used as a detached product, not least for SAP itself.) By now, it is quite apparent, though, that (a) Oracle as a company is actively pursuing customer choice in cloud host; and (b) OCI services are extensive, mature, and accessible enough to be measured against those of any of the major cloud service providers for hosting just about any application.
Looking Ahead
The significance of Oracle’s announcement extends beyond a mere cloud migration story. Notably, Oracle’s ability to host a direct competitor’s software system—SAP—speaks to OCI’s growing stature as a competent and flexible cloud service. The successful navigation through the complex migration challenges for Loblaw, a large-scale enterprise, is a testament to OCI’s robustness and reliability. This case also makes a compelling argument for considering Oracle as a versatile cloud service provider, highlighting its commitment to customer choice and the company’s technical proficiency across the full stack.
Oracle’s successful migration for Loblaw represents a pivotal moment both for the company and for the broader cloud industry. It establishes OCI as a versatile, performance-oriented cloud infrastructure service, encouraging a move toward more open and flexible cloud ecosystems. This successful migration could effectively challenge the market position of other major cloud service providers, promoting a more competitive and customer-focused landscape.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Guy is the CTO at Visible Impact, responsible for positioning, GTM, and sales guidance across technologies and markets. He has decades of field experience describing technologies, their business and community value, and how they are evaluated and acquired. Guy’s specialty areas include cloud, DevOps/cloud-native/12-factor, enterprise applications, Big Data, governance-risk-compliance, containerization, virtualization, HPC, CPUs-GPUs, and systems lifecycle management.
Guy started his technology career as a research director for technology media company Ziff Davis, with stints at PC Magazine, eWeek, and CIO Insight. Prior to joining Visible Impact, he worked at Dell, including postings in marketing, product, and technical marketing groups for a wide range of products, including engineered systems, cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, and mission-critical cloud services. He lives and works in Austin, TX
Steven engages with the world’s largest technology brands to explore new operating models and how they drive innovation and competitive edge.
