BT Tests Applications 60% Faster, Performs Upgrades and Migrations Confidently with Comprehensive Real-life Workload Testing
 
 

BT Tests Applications 60% Faster, Performs Upgrades and Migrations Confidently with Comprehensive Real-life Workload Testing

  • Oracle Customer:  BT
    Location:  London, United Kingdom
    Industry:  Communications
    Annual Revenue:  Over $5 Billion

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BT Group plc is a leading communications solutions and services provider with operations in 170 countries. The company provisions fixed-line, broadband, mobile, and TV products and services, as well as networked IT services. As part of BT Group plc, BT Operate is responsible for managing BT’s IT and network infrastructure platforms and ensuring reliability, security, and efficiency across the entire network.

BT has been a communications services provider for more than 100 years. During recent decades, BT’s IT and infrastructure business has grown globally to 17,000 databases and 30,000 servers. With such a large number of databases, servers, and applications to manage, migrations and upgrades posed a significant problem for BT in terms of risk, time, and cost to the business. In particular, business critical applications, such as Oracle’s Siebel Contact Center, which houses 13 million retail customer records, could pose a major challenge during upgrades.

BT relies heavily on its database infrastructure to reliably deliver communications services to its customers. Previously, BT tested using historical scripting methods, which meant that it was unable to accurately replicate workloads prior to any upgrade or migration. As part of a proof of concept on upgrades and reliability, BT chose two applications, a data warehousing application and an on-line transaction processing application to prove the benefits of Oracle Real Application Testing. Oracle Real Application Testing helped BT to eliminate the risks associated with change by enabling testing against real workloads prior to production.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from BT

  • "Oracle Real Application Testing's benefits are staggering. We have eliminated the risks and significantly reduced the costs associated with change." – Surren Partabh, CTO, Core Technologies, BT Operate

  • Accurately replicate workloads prior to a system upgrade or migration for testing that minimizes detrimental effects on the user experience
  • Reassure internal customers, such as BT Retail and BT Wholesale, that upgrades and migrations will go smoothly and will not cause unnecessary disruption to communications services provided to customers
  • Deliver migrations and upgrades in a confident and reliable manner
  • Reduce the time and cost required to thoroughly test prior to an upgrade or migration
  • Maintain vendor support and security by upgrading to new releases in a timely manner
  • Reduce hardware and environmental costs by eliminating older, less efficient and under-used hardware

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Used Oracle Real Application Testing—with Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g — to ensure quick technology adoptions while eliminating the risks associated with change
  • Combined a workload capture-and-replay feature with an SQL performance analyzer to test changes against real-life workloads, and then fine-tune the changes before putting them into production
  • Reassured the business that migrations and upgrades would go as planned because systems would be thoroughly tested before using real workloads
  • Used SQL Performance Analyzer to ensure that code will run correctly in the new environment through fine-tuning and retesting
  • Used Database Replay to capture and recreate the workload and ensure the system will run smoothly following upgrades
  • Reduced average testing time by 60% using Oracle Real Application Testing in place of historical scripting methods
  • Modernized testing methods through the ability to test the system using real-life workloads, increasing assurance of proper postdeployment performance that meets complex demands in supporting BT's day-to-day operations as one of the world’s leading communications solutions and services providers
  • Avoided situations where BT Operate could potentially lose 100 worker-days to fix just one migration or upgrade, by conducting thorough testing to ensure such situations did not arise
  • Maintained all security standards and kept up-to-date with vendor support by upgrading to new releases in a timely manner
  • Reviewed application usage rates and eliminated older, less efficient hardware as part of migration or upgrade programs, reducing costs and environmental impact

Why Oracle

BT has an “Oracle First” strategy that was developed to maximize its return-on-investment in Oracle by driving consumption of Oracle products and services across BT following its purchase of an enterprisewide license in 2007. Oracle Real Application Testing is an integral component of Oracle Database, Enterprise Edition 11g and is the ideal tool to deliver the real-life workload testing that BT requires. BT now deploys Oracle Real Application Testing as a best practice for all database testing scenarios.

“Oracle Real Application Testing helped us to modernize our databases and applications infrastructure,” said Surren Partabh, CTO, core technologies, BT Operate “It also enabled us to minimize risk during upgrades and migrations. We can now provide a degree of assurance to the business that we were simply unable to offer before.”

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