Oracle Customer Success—Cognizant Technology Solutions

Cognizant Technology Solutions Improves Database and Application Scalability to Support Growth, Reduces Power Consumption by 75%

We moved to Oracle Exadata Database Machine as part of our initiative to enhance system performance and scale to support future growth. Our IT and functional teams, along with Oracle, worked together to seamlessly move our large data volumes onto Oracle Exadata with minimal disruption to day-to-day operations and in record time.

— Robert Telesmanic, Senior Vice President and Corporate Controller, Cognizant Technology Solutions

Headquartered in Teaneck, New Jersey, Cognizant Technology Solutions provides IT consulting and business process outsourcing to help global enterprises achieve efficient and cost-effective operations, and to provide them with a low-risk way to invest in innovative technologies. With over 75 delivery centers worldwide and more than 199,700 employees, Cognizant combines a passion for client satisfaction; technology innovation; deep industry and business-process expertise; and a global, collaborative workforce that embodies the future of work.

Business Challenge

Eliminate frequent and unpredictable system slowdowns and 12-hour downtime periods to help improve employee satisfaction and support a projected increase in information technology consulting work
Improve response times for business-critical Oracle Web Center Content and PeopleSoft applications, which are used for the human resources, financial management, and timesheet systems that the professional services firm relies on to bill clients accurately and promptly for consulting engagements and IT services

Implement a scalable enterprise-system architecture to support the growth expected in rapid transactions, users, and data volume for the next several years
Consolidate servers to reduce maintenance requirements, energy costs, and the environmental footprint

Replaced under-performing legacy servers with Oracle Exadata Database Machine and Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud—benefitting from hardware and software that is designed and optimized to work together—to reduce time by 65% for the top-40, critical batch processes and to provide faster access to customer data and internal information
Gained on-demand server scalability for Oracle’s PeopleSoft applications and the Oracle Web Center Content environment with Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, enabling Cognizant to support a user base that is twice as large, yet with 67% fewer application and web servers than its legacy environment

Implemented a comprehensive hardware and software platform that is engineered to work together in just one week instead of four—enabling project teams to complete work more quickly while ensuring greater billing accuracy
Accelerated transaction response time and improved application performance by at least 50%, without any tuning effort—greatly improving the user experience, boosting productivity, and enabling employees to focus on adding value to client projects
Supported nearly 200,000 employees’ 24/7 access to PeopleSoft Release 9.1 applications to more quickly complete enterprise transactions, such as customer contracting and billing, project-resource assignments, associate time tracking, and associate expense reporting—essential for accurate and timely billing of the company’s IT services
Accelerated timesheet processing 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 the monthly account close process by 50%, helping management make better-informed decisions to support consulting business growth
Shortened the time-to-market for new and enhanced application services, improving employee satisfaction and confidence among business units to support new and innovative consulting functionalities
Reduced the database server footprint and space requirements, achieving 75% savings in power consumption and eliminating unnecessary overhead costs
Reduced the time needed to manage system performance incidents from 160 hours per month to almost zero, while cutting the weekly maintenance window from 8 to 12 hours to just 2 hours per week, enabling IT staff to focus on more strategic projects
Eliminated the need for a dedicated employee to manage weekend server and application maintenance
Worked with Oracle Advanced Customer Support Services and Oracle University to facilitate training to ensure associate understanding of the new functionality and support a smooth transition to the new system

Why They Chose Oracle

Cognizant considered several vendors to upgrade its enterprise systems architecture, but the scalability and speed of the Oracle solution made it the clear choice.

Conversion of our database and related infrastructure to the Oracle Exadata platform was one of the most critical projects we have ever undertaken. Given the operational criticality of the PeopleSoft suite, we had virtually no margin for error. Project complexity was exacerbated by the involvement of over 10 teams, internal to Cognizant as well as external, and by our massive data size. It was also necessary to transition both production and disaster-recovery environments simultaneously. Given these challenges, the Cognizant and Oracle teams worked in lockstep to achieve a seamless, silk-smooth transition to the new platform. In fact, this has been one of our smoothest projects to date, and we have been deriving the performance and scalability benefits of the Oracle Exadata platform ever since.

— Vishnu Potty, Vice President, Cognizant Technology Solutions

Execution

Cognizant completed the entire Oracle implementation process in approximately seven months. This included Oracle Exadata installation and configuration; connecting Oracle Exalogic to Oracle Exadata; setting up Oracle databases for PeopleSoft Human Resources, PeopleSoft Financials, and PeopleSoft Enterprise Learning Management; setting up disaster recovery; configuring the synchonization between primary and secondary production and disaster recovery instances; migrating the PeopleSoft IBM DB2 database to Oracle using Oracle Migration Factory; and retrofitting SQL and PeopleSoft objects that were migrated from DB2 to Oracle.

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