Sapura Marítima improves performance up to 30% with Oracle Cloud

Headquartered in Rio de Janeiro, Sapura Navegação Marítima began its journey in underwater engineering services off the Brazilian coast in 2014. Today, with a fleet of six ships to install flexible underseas pipelines, the Brazilian company has emerged as one of the market’s main service providers, employing more than 1,000 professionals. Investment in innovation for performance and safety is part of the company's DNA.

In the first three years of operation, the shipping company relied on a data center using on-premises servers. But as its work progressed, the organization’s leaders felt they needed to modernize and migrate critical applications, including Oracle E-Business Suite, to the cloud.

Sapura chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) initially due to the excellent cost-benefit return compared with the cost of hardware upgrades that its physical data center would need. “In the studies we did, in conversations with cloud service providers, and in a meeting with Oracle we saw that the savings we would get by not buying hardware would cover the costs of our migration in at least three years," says Jorge Kort, IT manager at Sapura Navegação Marítima.

In 2017, Sapura used Oracle’s first-generation cloud infrastructure to run Oracle E-Business Suite and get scalable cloud computing resources on demand. Sapura then moved to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), which offers more advanced services, in a second stage of modernization.

Using OCI gave Sapura typically 20% to 30% better performance than its on-premises data center. One report, on the financial management of each ship, used to take 1 hour but now runs in just 15 minutes.

Sapura has reduced overtime for IT teams, since there’s less support work and maintenance required to keep systems running. Having cloud-based infrastructure and applications also makes it easier to exchange information with the company’s ships, which might remain at sea for as many as three weeks at a time.

The migration of Oracle E-Business Suite and other applications to OCI proved even easier than expected, says Kort. "We had planned with the consulting project team a 54-hour window, but we were pleasantly surprised that, during the migration, we managed to reduce it by 12 hours," he says.