Dedicated Region Cloud@Santa

The North Pole runs a complex operation—from staffing, to logistics, to security—and Santa travels thousands of miles to deliver toys to 2.2 billion children in 193 countries in one night.

To meet peak demand on Christmas Eve and scale down for the rest of the year, Santa needs a cloud that can deliver scalability, security, performance and elasticity. And with a Dedicated Region Cloud@Santa behind Santa’s private firewall and in his data center, Oracle Cloud is making his Christmas wishes come true.

While many of us know the tale of The Night Before Christmas, the story we don’t hear is about how all the magic comes together. Grab your milk and cookies and join Santa as he takes us on a journey through his whole operation including hiring and managing thousands of elves, ensuring that all his parts arrive on time, and helping make sure all his finances are in order—all with a little help from Oracle Cloud.

A very autonomous Christmas

Santa’s sled isn’t self-driving, but the naughty and nice list is. Santa’s Autonomous Database provides a secure, high-performance environment that automates upgrades and patches without manual processes by any creature—human or magical. Santa wants his elves busy making toys, not managing software. It’s also self-repairing, so it detects and protects from system failures (such as late-night elf maple syrup parties). In case of an emergency—a Grinch hack, for example—Santa won’t lose all of the names and naughty/nice deeds that he and his elves spent the year collecting.

Ho, ho, ho, low code

Santa is tired of making spreadsheets and checking them twice—he just needs to know who is naughty and who is nice. While he’s not tech savvy, in the time it took to say, “Ho ho ho,” he built a new low-code APEX application to help track when kids are good or bad. Now Santa and his elves can log into a single, centralized app where the data is maintained and updated in real time. Armed with intuitive data visualizations and dashboards, and Oracle Database’s ability to manage location data exposed through the APEX application, Santa can make informed delivery decisions and optimize his route before hopping in his sleigh on Christmas Eve.

CX: Christmas experience

This year’s Nice List is overflowing with the names of boys and girls who have spread good will and cheer. With the help of Oracle Cloud CX, Santa and his elves are working hard to give children magical Christmas experiences. Today’s communications with children are becoming more complex though. Instead of mailing handwritten letters to Santa, children are sending their Christmas wishes through digital platforms, such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and TikTok. With Oracle Cloud CX, Santa is able to master the signals children are sending him via digital channels so he knows what gifts to leave underneath their tree. If they change their minds—as children often do—Santa can use the AI and machine learning capabilities of Oracle Unity, the customer intelligence platform. Unity gathers insights in real time, keeping Santa up to date on each child’s preference. Come Christmas Eve, he’ll be able to deliver highly personalized gifts to boys and girls around the world.

ERP: Elf and resource planning

The Nice List is bigger than ever this year, which means the North Pole needs to keep a close eye on its finances and operations. With Oracle Cloud EPM, Santa can accurately forecast and budget to make sure his workshops are equipped to churn out millions of presents. Once children’s letters arrive at the North Pole, Santa can adjust forecasts and assign resources to his elves to begin production. Meanwhile, Workshop CFO Mrs. Claus turns to Oracle Cloud ERP for insight into the organization’s financial position. With a clear view into the finances, Mrs. Claus can budget for toy materials, pay the elves, and manage candy expenses. Oracle Cloud ERP enables the North Pole’s network of Mall Santa representatives to easily submit expense reports for travel, food, and lodging via a mobile-friendly digital assistant. The machine learning and automation in Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud EPM help Mrs. Claus quickly and accurately close the books. With deep insights into their finance operations, Santa and Mrs. Claus have the information needed to drive year-over-year increases in growth and global joy.

Elf management: Maintaining a merry workforce

With so many children on the Nice List this year, Santa’s workshop is going into overdrive to make enough toys by Christmas Day. With the help of Oracle Cloud HCM, Santa can quickly find the best elves available to recruit, hire, and train. Using the most innovative technology, Oracle Cloud HCM helps Santa’s workshop deliver a positive elf experience, creating Christmas joy all year round, despite the long hours and hard work ahead. With self-service applications and an on-demand digital assistant, all the elves can access their schedules, peppermint pay stubs, and get answers to any workshop question—quickly and easily via voice or text. Building a happy, productive, and motivated team of elves will help Santa spread holiday cheer to every girl and boy this year.

Elf accommodations with tech innovations

With an increased elf workforce traveling in from all over the world, Santa’s team needs to provide comfortable accommodations. Thankfully, the North Pole lodge offers full amenities including premier rooms, dining, and a spa to relax and rejuvenate. Powered by Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud, the lodge can ensure each elf guest has a memorable and safe stay. Working with numerous partners, Oracle helped the lodge reimagine touchless guest experiences including mobile check-in, keyless room entry, chatbot-enabled service, and of course, 24/7 app-based hot chocolate delivery. With built-in analytics, the hotel staff can ensure all operations are running smoothly and each team member has the intelligence they need to provide each guest with a personalized experience.

On-demand elf eats and festive treats

New COVID-19 restrictions mean indoor dining is closed at the North Pole’s restaurants and hot chocolate bars. So what’s Santa to do to ensure thousands of hungry elves get fed? With all the North Pole eating establishments running on Oracle MICROS Simphony Cloud, each eatery is able to quickly pivot to offer new touchless experiences including booking an outdoor reservation, QR-code–based menus, and app and online ordering for sled-side pickup and delivery. Now each elf can order the meal they are craving—be it a peppermint mocha or spaghetti with syrup—all with the touch of a few buttons. And as all orders are flowing through MICROS point-of-sale systems, the kitchen teams have full visibility into orders and scheduling to ensure hot, delicious meals get delivered to busy elves.

SCM: Supply chain miracles

Delivering gifts to more than 2 billion girls and boys in one night is a feat that only Santa and his trusty reindeer can pull off. But with the havoc wreaked on supply chains this year, Santa’s workshop will need some extra holiday magic to get the job done. Using Oracle Cloud SCM, Santa’s elves built a highly flexible and resilient supply chain to prepare for the most frenzied Christmas Eve St. Nick has ever faced. Santa’s elves now have a dependable inventory of toy trucks and American Girl dolls across the North Pole’s supply network. Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled sensors attached to Santa’s sleigh and workshop leverage Oracle Intelligent Track and Trace to ensure that every present makes the 25,000-mile journey. With logistical accuracy that’s downright magical, Oracle Cloud SCM will help Santa save the 2020 holiday season.

Santa slays Christmas with high performance computing

Although Santa is used to driving his sleigh through blizzards, he’d like to avoid extreme weather conditions, if possible. To help optimize Santa’s delivery routes, his team of DevOps elves built a cloud native weather forecasting app on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Using Oracle’s high-performance computing (HPC) platform and a stack of Nvidia A100 GPUs, the elves instantly analyze billions of satellite-captured weather patterns and then run a machine learning algorithm to predict when and where severe weather events will occur on the evening of December 24. “Oracle HPC helps me quickly run billions of route-changing calculations while I’m delivering presents,” Santa says. “Red-nosed reindeer are great, but real-time weather updates will help me bring Christmas cheer to everyone!”