Ok Tedi Mining uses Oracle SD-WAN to enable always-on network connections

Summary

Oracle SD-WAN helps Ok Tedi deliver a reliable communications network in Papua New Guinea.

Products:

Oracle SD-WAN

Business challenges

Ok Tedi’s business challenges centered around improved network performance for safety and operational benefit. Both Cloud and on-premises applications use Oracle’s SD-WAN to provide high-precision mining services, upgraded process control, real-time fatigue management, and fleet tracking and monitoring systems. In addition, the company required cloud-based productivity applications to improve the quality and timeliness of information being provided to decision-makers.

We trialed the Oracle SD-WAN and were immediately impressed with the approach to real time WAN access across our fiber, MEO and GEO providers.

Ryan Oxenham

Superintendent Business Improvement Technology, Ok Tedi

Why Ok Tedi Mining Chose Oracle

There are both business and technical reasons for selecting Oracle’s SD-WAN. From a business perspective, Oracle offered Ok Tedi a higher-capacity, more resilient network. Better connectivity improves mining operations and progressively improves team collaboration, streamlines business processes, improves the quality and timeliness of management information, in addition to implementing a range of safety and operational productivity projects. Oracle SD-WAN was selected as the clear technology solution, in part due to a unique technical capability of translating Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) WAN traffic to connectionless User Datagram Protocol (UDP) sessions before uplink transmission.

Results

Using Oracle SD-WAN, Ok Tedi improved “application fluency” to achieve 50% better application quality of experience. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Ok Tedi staff rapidly deployed reliable and less costly mining operations and WAN bandwidth connectivity to remote suppliers and a distributed workforce. Nearly 25% more additional remote team members operated seamlessly.

Oracle’s autonomous SD-WAN functionality ensured Ok Tedi’s always-on, reliable network connectivity to more than a dozen discrete locations. With the pandemic impacting global trade and the commodities market, it was critical to preserve auto-recovery/convergence resolution of network latency based on sub-second inspection of the network path by Oracle SD-WAN intelligence. In the end, Ok-Tedi achieved its highly sought 99.999% uptime for offshore data centers based in Australia.

Partners

Yell IT was selected by Ok Tedi after meeting with several of the IT services firm’s hundreds of customers who spoke to the firm’s reliable IT solutions. With mostly aging satellite and copper-based infrastructure in PNG, Ok Tedi needed Yell IT to move mountains to ensure network continuity.

Yell IT, based in Brisbane, Australia, offers application security, networking, and cloud and managed IT services. Yell IT helped Ok Tedi move its existing Office 365 suite applications to the cloud.