Oracle Customer Success—Public Pension Agency

Public Pension Agency Boosts Quality of Services Delivered to Public Sector and Military Pension Beneficiaries While Reducing Database Licenses by 40%

Our core mission is to ensure financial resources and high-quality services for public sector and military retirees and their family members, while benefiting society through large-scale investment projects and contribution to social justice. Our successful deployment of Oracle SuperCluster—as the first government body in Saudi Arabia to deploy it—has delivered the IT infrastructure we need to fulfill our mission both now and in the future, and at a low cost of ownership.

— Eng. Faraj Al Juaid, Network and Operation Manager, Public Pension Agency

The Public Pension Agency (PPA), an entity of Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Finance, is responsible for administering the pension schemes of public sector and military retirees, ensuring financial resources for retirees and their dependants after termination of service. PPA operates 46 branch offices across the country, runs automated payment procedures, and handles phone inquiries through a 24/7 call center. Since it was founded in 1958, the agency has paid out more than US$50 billion and has benefited 1.1 million pensioners and family members.

When the Saudi Arabian government defined a retirement age for all professions some 15 years ago, the number of retirees started to increase significantly in both public sector and the military. With a monthly expenditure of more than US$500 million and nearly 800,000 beneficiaries, PPA needs to achieve annual returns of at least 6%. The agency successfully runs large-scale investment activities to balance earnings and spending, such as the King Abdullah Financial District and a 2.7 million square meter residential and commercial area in the country’s capital, Jeddah.

Business Challenge

Gain maximum availability for core applications to ensure consistent financing of public sector and military pension schemes and high service quality to nearly 800,000 beneficiaries
Reduce time-to-market for pension schemes and services by optimizing the application development lifecycle—previously relying on databases spread across heterogeneous machines and operating systems—in a consolidated Unix environment

Consolidate multiple servers, databases and applications on a single platform to reduce capital expenses and ensure low total cost of ownership (TCO) for IT infrastructure, contributing to balanced public budgets
Increase performance for large-scale, transaction-intensive applications such as pension schemes and investment programs by replacing legacy hardware with a multi-purpose platform

Ensured consistent funding and seamless running of the country’s programs and services for public sector and military retirees and their dependents by deploying an integrated server, software, storage and networking platform and delivering extreme database and application performance with minimal support and maintenance requirements
Consolidated the organization’s Unix environment in a private cloud to minimize operational issues, optimize application development lifecycle, and increase business agility with faster responses to unforeseen events—using Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center 12c for managing Solaris zones and reducing time to market for pension programs and services

Reduced the number of Oracle Database licenses by 40% and leveraged built-in virtualization with Oracle VM Server for SPARC and Oracle Solaris Zones for Oracle and third-party applications to deliver extreme performance at a very low total cost of ownership—such as 10x increased database throughput and 4x faster queries—and enhancing the quality of services delivered to nearly 800,000 beneficiaries of public sector and military pensions
Ensured high availability for multiple application tier systems by deploying an Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture (MAA) solution, running Oracle Database on Oracle SuperCluster and Oracle Exadata X4‐2 in an active/active Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) configuration and replicating data with Oracle GoldenGate across two data centers
Maintained system health using Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c's centralized management console to monitor production, development and testing environments on Oracle SuperCluster—providing 500+ professional users with extreme system performance and availability to perform their tasks hassle-free
Enhanced enterprise resource planning agility and information security thanks to maximum availability and performance of Oracle E‐Business Suite, Oracle Identity Management and Oracle Access Management; using Oracle Active Data Guard to link two Oracle SuperCluster machines in an active/passive Oracle RAC configuration
Collaborated with Oracle Advanced Customer Support to deploy and configure the solution within 10 months, ensuring fast implementation and mitigating migration risks such as disruption to pension payments and services
Ensured compliance with ISO/IEC 12207 software lifecycle standards by using Oracle production, testing and development environments with fully integrated and redundant compute, storage and networking components for developing and maintaining software

Oracle’s multi-purpose engineered system is the ideal platform to achieve our targets: optimized use of resources, great agility and high quality of services, improved information security, reduced risk, and less capital expense. The platform enables us to fully focus on our core mission and deliver outstanding services to the country’s pension schemes beneficiaries.

— Subhi Tello Al Nashwati, Database Administrator, Public Pension Agency