Wijeya Newspapers Limited (WNL), Sri Lanka’s largest private news publisher, has boosted the user experience for the growing reader base of its 25 online publications by deploying Oracle Cloud. Using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) the publishing house can now bring to its online readers multimedia content 20 percent faster while also reducing its costs by 40 percent with near zero downtime.

Due to the pandemic, WNL saw a huge increase in demand for contactless digital offerings, with many of its subscribers turning to its web portal for the latest news. Increased web traffic caused service degradation affecting the subscriber's online experience since the content delivery was from a data center in the US. Wanting to ensure business continuity, WNL selected OCI for its performance capabilities, high availability, and ability to reduce costs.

“There is huge competition in the online publications industry with quality and responsiveness being a critical feature for subscribers – even milliseconds matter. We needed to be able to provide our quality content on time, and cost-effectively,” said Naveen Gunarathne, General Manager – Information Technology, Wijeya Newspapers Limited. “Our cost analysis between AWS, our legacy cloud provider, and Oracle showed a difference between the two vendors. Oracle was able to expedite our go-to-market time as the migration of our 25 websites, custom-built, content management system and databases was completed with minimal code changes and in a very short space of time.”

After completing the migration, WNL is able to cater for tens of thousands of subscribers. Customers have also reported an increase in satisfaction since latency has been reduced up to 41 percent. OCI has also helped WNL streamline processes for authoring, publishing, and archiving content, which have significantly enhanced employee productivity and helped increase collaboration within the in-house IT team, who are now able to manage day-to-day operations like maintenance, database management, and IT infrastructure monitoring more efficiently. Previously, these tasks were outsourced.

“Media houses, along with other organizations, have witnessed their entire business models disrupted due to the pandemic. With Cloud technology, WNL has transformed their business and gained significant competitive advantage,” said Nalin Sikurajapathy, Head Of Technology - Sri Lanka & Maldives, Oracle. “By enabling modernization, better cost control and eliminating infrastructure silos for WNL, Oracle Cloud is delivering streamlined processes and freeing their time and funds to focus on strategies to serve their readers even better.”

Lexicon Tech, a member of Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN), implemented the project forWNL. The contract was awarded to Lexicon in May 2021, the first publication was successfully migrated within 3 days of awarding the contract, and the project was completed by mid-June 2021.

“Our team put a tremendous effort into the change management process and Lexicon’s previous experiences of positioning OCI over the other cloud providers gave us a significant added value here. Apart from that, our approach of conducting a successful proof of concept with proper total cost of ownership analysis was able to prove that customer is making the right decision,” said Aruna Silva, CEO of Lexicon Tech.