SEFE chooses Oracle AI Database@Azure to support energy business transformation
The migration of core energy workloads to Oracle AI Database@Azure delivered a 20% boost in application and database performance.
United Kingdom | Oil and Gas
“Operating in Europe’s dynamic energy market, we can’t afford downtime or compromise on performance. Oracle AI Database@Azure delivers the cloud resilience, reliability, and speed we need while allowing us to maximize the value of our Microsoft Azure investment. We saw business-process performance improvements of 20% to 45%, exceeding our ROI projections.”
SEFE, the leading integrated energy company, delivers critical gas, electricity, and green energy solutions to more than 50,000 customers across Europe, from industry to municipalities. With the energy sector rapidly evolving, SEFE set out to modernize its IT landscape and exit its on-premises data centers. After migrating core CRM and metering workloads to Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle AI Database@Azure, SEFE achieved enterprise-grade availability, regulatory agility, and a 20% performance boost.
Why SEFE chose Oracle
With Europe’s energy market facing rapid transition, increased regulatory scrutiny, and heightened demand for reliability, SEFE leadership decided to migrate 39 databases supporting 13 business-critical applications—including its CRM and metering systems—from legacy IBM hardware to Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). Consolidating operations on Azure was a must to maximize existing investments and staff expertise and to support SEFE’s digital innovation journey.
However, a thorough risk assessment revealed that running Oracle Database on Azure VMs posed significant technical and financial challenges, including licensing limitations, lack of Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC) support, performance concerns, and increased risk of business disruption. With the help of the Oracle team, SEFE developed a full business case for moving to Oracle AI Database@Azure, projecting it would be net positive over a five-year period versus making expensive investments in hardware upgrades.
The company decided to adopt Oracle AI Database@Azure, the only solution that offers the OCI Exadata platform colocated inside Azure data centers. SEFE would be able to access Oracle Database services, including Oracle RAC, as native offerings within Azure, uniting industry-leading performance, high availability, and seamless integration with its Azure environment.
To capitalize on already committed project resources and its dedicated migration team, SEFE started with a four-week proof of concept (POC). Supported by Accenture for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Avanade (part of Accenture) for Azure, SEFE migrated a select set of smaller workloads to Oracle AI Database@Azure. During this pilot-to-production phase, SEFE responded rapidly to new EU GDPR data storage compliance requirements by decommissioning its UK data center and seamlessly transitioning disaster recovery workloads to the Paris availability zone, proving the agility of the solution. When the POC showed that SEFE would gain up to twice the performance for some applications, the company decided to migrate its entire Oracle estate using Oracle AI Database@Azure.
Results
SEFE’s migration of core workloads to Oracle AI Database@Azure resulted in a 20% improvement in application and database performance, with business-process performance improvements ranging from 20% to 45%, exceeding ROI projections. The new database environment also enables rapid, needs-based scaling to meet changing demand.
The flexible migration approach using Oracle Zero Downtime Migration helped SEFE maintain uninterrupted operations and meet demanding 24/7 service levels amid Europe’s turbulent energy market conditions. The company now runs Oracle RAC for its business-critical systems to reduce the risk of outages, with lower latency and high availability, while taking advantage of the processing power of Exadata for scalability across its core business systems. SEFE also strengthened data security by operating within a unified Azure environment and implementing Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) for its Oracle databases on Oracle AI Database@Azure.
Additionally, SEFE benefited from Oracle and Microsoft licensing and discount programs, including the ability to use Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACCs) to consume Oracle services as if they were natively part of Azure. This flexibility, combined with uninterrupted operations and secure, efficient service delivery across Europe, underscores the value of SEFE’s multicloud strategy with Oracle AI Database@Azure.
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About the company
SEFE is a leading integrated energy group focused on securing Europe’s energy supply and driving the transition to a sustainable energy future.