Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer simplifies integrations and saves 60% using OCI

MSD serves more than 1.3 million people and maintains over 10,000 miles of sewer lines in St. Louis, Missouri. It operates seven facilities that treat 370 million gallons of water per day. If those critical systems are interrupted, things can go downstream fast.

The IT team maintained dozens of on-premises and cloud applications which, over the last few years, created a costly and complex operation. Applications that were reaching end of life were inordinately expensive to maintain. Also hiring and retaining talent to support such a diverse portfolio was becoming more difficult. And, as is common in the public sector, budgets were tight. Securing funding for capital projects was difficult and time-consuming.

Consequently, in 2021 the organization decided to find a provider that would consolidate all IT solutions in one cloud infrastructure. The goals were to cut costs, simplify support, and deliver a better experience to stakeholders. Establishing a flexible and robust cloud platform became the key to supporting MSD’s needs while also anticipating future changes as the organization and its customers evolved.

As a longtime Oracle applications and technology customer, MSD relied on Oracle E-Business Suite Enterprise Resource Planning as its financial backbone. Additionally, in 2019 the district adopted Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) for planning and budgeting—the organization’s first significant foray into cloud applications. MSD also implemented Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition, an on-premises product for reporting and analytics.

Key milestones along the district’s digital transformation journey included migrating an outdated instance of Oracle Business Intelligence to a cloud analytics solution and lifting and shifting a heavily customized instance of ERP to the cloud. The IT team also maintained a hybrid portfolio of 50-plus Oracle and third-party applications.

Thus, it was important to choose a platform that offered a range of services that would handle all these scenarios. Because public sector organizations are extremely risk averse, rock-solid security and disaster recovery were table stakes in moving data processing and storage to the cloud.

After a thorough evaluation of cloud providers, MSD selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) because its extensive cloud services were the most comprehensive, secure, and reliable. Oracle also provided data that satisfied any concerns about security. Plus, Oracle’s simplified cloud pricing structure would help the district reduce CapEx, lower costs, and eliminate the unpredictability of supporting outdated on-premises applications.

After moving to OCI, MDS achieved 99.9% system uptime, meeting the district’s first critical requirement with ease. The shift from on-premises to the cloud was transparent to end users and employees.

With OCI integration services, integrations are easier and faster to establish and maintain. MSD established 50 integrations to support the organization’s hybrid applications portfolio, many of which are critical to providing services to residents. In addition, disaster recovery was automated and simplified, eliminating many manual tasks associated maintaining DR for MSD’s legacy on-premises technology platform. 

By moving to a single robust and flexible cloud platform, MSD was able to consolidate skill sets across the IT team and partners. As a result, support costs dropped by 60%.

After MSD went live on Oracle Analytics Cloud in early 2023, it no longer needed to administer its Oracle Business Intelligence on-premises infrastructure. This move enabled the IT team to analyze data across an unlimited number of databases. Staff merged data from operational systems—such as GIS and asset management applications—with financial data to provide more actionable analytics.