Challenges

• Accelerate response time for customers and agents that access Adriatic Slovenica’s online, insurance management platform for product inquiries, price quotes, claims, and payment applications
• Manage three terabytes of data and up to 600 concurrent agents and end-customer users without impact on performance
• Scale system to manage increasing transaction volumes and user numbers while reducing storage, lowering power usage, driving down license costs, and cutting maintenance overhead
• Benefit from specialized technical expertise to align the company’s insurance platform with changing business and market needs and accelerate the time to realize value from new technology investments

Solutions

• Replaced Oracle Database and Oracle Application Server infrastructure supporting the company’s insurance platform with a single Oracle Exadata Database Machine X2-2 Quarter Rack, running on Oracle Linux, to create a resilient, high-volume online transaction processing environment
• Migrated all agents and customer-facing activities related to selling and buying insurance products, quotations, premiums, claims, and settlements onto the new platform
• Benefited from Oracle Exadata’s unified networking, based on InfiniBand, to cut the average time for processing typical transactions, such as product inquiries, premium quotations, claims, and settlements, from one minute to six seconds
• Improved agent and customer satisfaction by eliminating peak-time bottlenecks and service delays
• Leveraged the extreme performance of Oracle Exadata to consolidate the workload onto fewer servers and cut the number of processors required from 24 to 12, which saved US$58,000 each year in license fees
• Cut system back-up times and simplified and streamlined management and support to improve database administrator productivity
• Benefited from Oracle Exadata’s built-in storage consolidation to cut data storage costs
• Gained a pre-optimized, preconfigured, and a pre-integrated hardware and software solution with the scalability to manage future growth cost-effectively by adding storage servers, database servers, and network switches incrementally, in line with business expansion
• Recycled the existing Oracle Database, servers, and storage area network (SAN) previously used to support the insurance platform to the back office and other systems that are not time critical, such as planning and forecasting

Why Oracle

Adriatic Slovenica evaluated solutions from Oracle and several other leading technology providers. Oracle Exadata Database Machine offered the best cost-to-performance ratio and demonstrated the highest return on investment over a five-year period.

“Oracle Exadata Database Machine exceeded the power and performance of alternate IT solutions we considered, for the same total hardware and licensing costs. The solution also integrated easily with the existing Oracle IT environment,” said Damijan Pregeljc, director of IT infrastructure, Adriatic Slovenica.

Implementation Process

Adriatic Slovenica implemented Oracle Exadata Database Machine in two days and went live over a weekend, which minimized system downtime for customers, agents, and partners. A traditional system implementation of this scale would have taken approximately eight days and incurred the additional cost of a parallel production environment to ensure business continuity during the switchover.

Choosing an engineered system that was preconfigured, pre-optimized, and ready to run significantly reduced system testing time and ensured a smooth go-live for Adriatic Slovenica. Additionally, comprehensive Oracle support for the entire hardware and software stack ensures rapid, one-stop problem resolution on an ongoing basis.

“Oracle Exadata Database Machine was deployed rapidly and with far less risk than a traditional IT environment, and it generated immediate performance improvements for our end users,” Pregeljc said.

Partner

Oracle Partner OSI d.o.o. served as project manager for the Oracle Exadata Database Machine implementation, which included migrating three terabytes of data. OSI d.o.o. won two Oracle awards in 2010 for best IT infrastructure implementation. It is a long-standing strategic partner to Adriatic Slovenica, having managed previous Oracle upgrades for the company. OSI d.o.o. also trained the company’s database administrators in routine maintenance and platform support.

“OSI d.o.o. met all our expectations for technical expertise, and demonstrated in-depth knowledge of the Oracle infrastructure, while providing us with a high-level of professionalism, customer service, and value for money. It will continue to support us as we take advantage of new Oracle Exadata Database Machine capabilities to continuously improve the service levels we provide to customers, agents and partners, while driving down operating costs,” Pregeljc said.