A World-Class Education - Migrating The University of Massachusetts to OAC

Summary

The University of Massachusetts is a world-class research university. They have moved their on premises Summit Enterprise Data Warehouse to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and migrated from Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) to Oracle Analytics Cloud.

The migration is part of their largescale transformation programme to reduce the operational expenditure on maintenance and administration of their IT systems. A training programme created confident end-users, helping the university make the most of their new platform to gain additional insight from their data.

Background

The university’s goal was to migrate its on-premises OBIEE. This migration project formed part of their large-scale transformation programme intended to reduce the university’s reliance on deprecated hardware and software, with OBIEE soon to be unsupported by Oracle.

The client wanted to reduce the operational expenditure on maintenance and administration of their network, database environments and application servers.

OAC is Platform as a Service, which minimises the need to upgrade, patch or manage the service in-house and as a cloud platform offers scalability and flexibility.

Migration requires expertise and experience to reduce its impact and cost. The client needed guidance to find the best solution. Rittman Mead has experience completing complex migrations and understands the impact on organisations. We managed the migration and were able to upskill the universities team through platform training.

How Can Rittman Mead Help?

We worked closely with the team at the University of Massachusetts to build a proof of concept (POC) to confirm that OAC meets the practical needs, security, scalability, and usability requirements of the university.

Having agreed the POC, we worked with the university in phase one of their user adoption programme. We gave the end- users an initial demonstration showing new functionality and enhancements.

Streamlined Process

We were able to streamline the migration process. Using our experience migrating customers we have a tried-and-tested process. We used our regression testing tool to reduce time spent on QA, without compromising on quality. We supported the university through a cycle of testing and fixes before rolling it out to production.

We set up performance monitoring, so the in-house development team could keep an eye on the resources used by system.

Phase two of the user adoption programme saw us complete three training courses to target different user types: technical, admin and end-user. This encouraged smooth onboarding to OAC for all stakeholders of the new system.

For the migration we spun up an OAC instance, configured it, connected to the on-premise data warehouse, set up the security and imported the OBIEE RPD and Web Catalog.

Benefits

• OAC is flexible and scalable. They now have the flexibility to turn on and off services as they need.
• No more need to do costly disruptive upgrades.
• OAC provides access to services that were not available on OBIEE. Including data visualisation, improved self service reporting, allowing users to write their own reports and integrate a wider range of data sources, eliminating the IT bottleneck.
• Rittman Mead’s migration approach ensured there was zero disruption. Users were able to continue their work throughout the migration.
• Our user adoption programme created confident end-users, helping the university make the most of their new platform and utilise the new functionality to gain additional insight from their data.
• The team at the University of Massachusetts were freed up to concentrate on improved self service, making access to data more democratised.

Rittman Mead Value

"Rittman Mead’s migration approach ensured there was zero disruption. Users were able to continue their work throughout the migration.“