Cognizant Reduces Server Requirements by 67%, Gains Scalability On Demand and Improves Application Speed by 50% with Engineered System
 
 

Cognizant Reduces Server Requirements by 67%, Gains Scalability On Demand and Improves Application Speed by 50% with Engineered System

  • Oracle Customer:  Cognizant
    Location:  Teaneck, New Jersey
    Industry:  Professional Services
    Employees:  150,400
    Annual Revenue:  Over $5 Billion

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Cognizant is a leading provider of information technology, consulting, and business process outsourcing services, dedicated to helping companies build stronger businesses. The firm has more than 821 clients that span five continents and every major industry. Cognizant has experienced rapid growth in recent years, and the organization expects that pace to continue.

Cognizant’s employees rely on Oracle’s PeopleSoft applications for their enterprise transactions, including human resources, financial, and supply chain management processes. The company also runs Oracle Content Manager.

As the organization continued to expand, its PeopleSoft application infrastructure, running on IBM, was having difficulty scaling to meet user demands. Response time was increasing for the system, which had more than two terabytes of data running on it. Employees were becoming frustrated and, if left unchecked, response time issues would begin to impact productivity in the professional services firm. In addition, the company had been adding servers as the environment grew, which created a greater IT maintenance burden in terms of time and dollars spent. For example, the weekly maintenance window had expanded to require between 8 to 12 hours and a dedicated person on the weekends.

Cognizant replaced its multiple Web, application, integration, and batch servers with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud. The company gained on-demand server scalability for its PeopleSoft applications and Oracle Content Manager environment, enabling it to support a user base that is twice as large, yet with 67% fewer application and Web servers than its legacy, IBM environment. It also accelerated message processing speed by 50% and cut its maintenance window to less than two hours per week.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from Cognizant

  • "We chose Oracle Exalogic to run our business-critical PeopleSoft Enterprise application environment. With Oracle Exalogic, we have not only doubled our application processing speeds to increase the performance and reliability of our business applications, but we have also significantly reduced total ownership and set the stage for future growth. We’re eager to share this technology with our customers, as we know firsthand the value it can deliver." – Sathish Venkataraman, Associate Director, Cognizant Application Services, Cognizant

  • Improve response times for business-critical Oracle Content Manager and PeopleSoft applications, including human resources, financial management, and time-sheet systems that the professional services firm relies on to bill clients accurately and promptly for consulting engagements and IT services
  • Implement a data infrastructure that can support sustained rapid growth as the firm expects to expand
  • Consolidate servers to reduce maintenance requirements, energy costs, and the environmental footprint

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Deployed Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X2-2 Half Rack to run the company’s PeopleSoft Enterprise applications and its Oracle Content Manager environment―gaining on-demand scalability and the ability to support a user base that is twice as large, with 67% fewer application and Web servers than the company’s legacy IBM environment
  • Improved the downstream, integration-processing throughput rate by 50%, enabling applications to be more responsive
  • Automated recurring maintenance activities to support a global consulting workforce that needs access to key business applications seven days a week, reducing the application maintenance window to less than 2 hours, compared to previously requiring between 8 and 12 hours weekly
  • Accelerated time-to-market for new and enhanced application services, for example: the company can now introduce new functionalities with ease, such as customer evaluations
  • Enabled all 150,400 employees to more efficiently enter their biweekly time sheets, which is essential to producing accurate and timely billing for the company’s IT services
  • Accelerated time-sheet processing speeds from 7,200 messages per hour to 14,000 messages per hour, enabling the organization to process all employee timesheets within eight hours and to bill clients promptly for its professional consulting services
  • Accelerated transaction response time and application performance, greatly improving the general user experience, boosting productivity, and enabling employees to focus on adding value to client projects
  • Reduced data-center floor space requirements, thereby eliminating unnecessary overhead costs
  • Eliminated the need for a dedicated employee to manage weekend server and application maintenance
  • Enabled application scalability to a scale up to double loads with one-third fewer Java virtual machines (JVM) and half the Tuxedo threads of its earlier, IBM-based, AIX system
  • Provided sufficient head room for further expansion without needing additional JVMs or Tuxedo threads
  • Reduced the server footprint by supporting the entire application layer, including applications, Web, batch, application, and integration broker layers, with just four Exalogic nodes, compared to 11 physical, IBM servers, providing the opportunity to support company growth without needing additional Exalogic nodes
  • Reduced the application maintenance window from 10 hours to less than 2 hours with the help of the centralized facility available in Exalogic, which automated weekly Web and application server maintenance, required fewer support resources, and increased availability for end users
  • Improved application performance by at least 50% across the board, without any tuning effort and processed integration-broker messages at least 50% faster

Why Oracle

“We were up for a hardware refresh just as our business began to expand exponentially,” said Shankar Sathyanarayanan, associate director for Oracle solutions practice, Cognizant. “We knew this was the time to align our hardware environment with our core business applications. While we evaluated multiple solutions alongside Oracle Exalogic, no other vendor provided the same scalability and manageability as Oracle. Also important to our decision was the intrinsic value of Oracle’s engineered systems, which, by design, optimized performance of Oracle applications.”

Implementation Process

Cognizant worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services for capacity planning. With Oracle’s, help Cognizant installed Oracle Exalogic on time, on budget, and with minimal disruption to the business.

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