Applications Express Crash Course in Modernization
One of Oracle’s “best kept secrets” helps the Board of Governors for the State University System of Florida graduate to a new IT system.
by Marta Bright, March 2009
Despite the inevitable mental scrapes and occasional lost weekend, few things can top the value of on the job training. IT professionals in particular are champions of the school of hard knocks and to get them through the rough spots, they often develop their own repertoire of “secret weapons”, which are the tools they know they can rely upon to get them out of a jam.
Such was the case for Ramon Padilla, assistant vice chancellor of information resource management for the Board of Governors for the State University System of Florida. An avid fan of Oracle Application Express (Oracle APEX), a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database, Padilla is convinced it’s one of Oracle’s best-kept secrets. “Most people don’t even realize they have it [APEX] when they purchase an Oracle database,” he says. He also maintains that APEX was the most critical tool he had on hand to get his team through near-impossible project that was dropped into his lap when he took over managing legacy operations three years ago.
The data center, which serves 11 state universities located throughout Florida, was built around a mainframe/COBOL environment, and all of the legacy system experts were due to retire. If they did so before the system was modernized, no one would have the skills to keep the business systems running. “I already knew what an Oracle database could do, but more importantly I knew it came equipped with APEX, and given the task at hand, and the limited skills that my team had, I knew the only way I was going to be able to pull this off was to utilize APEX.”
New to anything outside of the mainframe/COBOL environment, Padilla needed something that his team could use quickly, and Applications Express was a good fit. Oracle Application Express is a rapid web application development tool for the Oracle database. Using only a web browser and limited programming experience, IT staff can develop and deploy professional applications that are both fast and secure. APEX reports are typically hypertext linked with other reports, which allowed Padilla’s development team to navigate through database data in the same way they would navigate any ordinary Web site. Additionally, APEX’s extensive charting engine allows SQL queries to be represented graphically and that allows data to be more effectively communicated.
Racing Against the Clock
The gears of higher education grind slowly and large-scale IT projects often move at a snail’s pace or stall out altogether before funding is approved. It was late 2007 and Padilla had been on board with the Florida Board of Governors for just a few months. Initially, Padilla thought he had missed his window of opportunity to submit a proposal for funds, but after some encouragement from one of the department veterans, the two scrambled to submit budget request to his board and legislature. “Part of my proposal was not actually selling the board or legislature on APEX per se,” says Padilla. “I was more interested in building a case that Oracle’s database product, which included APEX, was the technology bundle that was going to enable me to complete the migration off of the old mainframe system within the timeframe they’d given me and with the amount of money they’d given me to do it.” That time frame was a short twelve months. Fortunately, the scramble paid off and within 12 weeks, Padilla was granted the money to move ahead with the project.
While the project clock started ticking on July 1st, 2007, Padilla still had to navigate the state-managed purchasing process, which can be very slow. It was November by the time the purchase had been completed and Padilla’s team had a few skeletal pieces in place for creating any sort of platform to work with. “I had to be off the old mainframe and game-ready on the new system come July 1st, 2008,” he recalls. “The clock is ticking away and we’ve barely got the technology tools we needed in place because we can’t move it through purchasing fast enough.”
