Business

Responsible for advising the New Zealand government on tax policy, collecting tax and administering social support programs.

Solution

Implemented a Private Middleware Platform as a Service (PaaS) running on Oracle Exalogic to support migration from Sun Java Composite Application Platform (Java CAPS or JCAPS) to Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g/12c against a very aggressive time frame, driven by JCAPS end of support timeline.

Oracle Products

• Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud X5-2

• Oracle Traffic Director

• Oracle WebLogic Server (11g & 12c)

• Oracle SOA Suite (11g & 12c)

• Oracle B2B Server 11g

• Oracle MFT Server 12c

• JCA Adapter for SAP 12c

• Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c

• Oracle WebLogic Management Pack 12c

• Oracle SOA Management Pack 12g

• Oracle Database Enterprise Edition 11g R2

‍

Results

• Automated provisioning of 9 environments, 65 domains, 9 Web tiers, across dual sites.

• Provisioned initial environments 20 times faster - 30 days with MyST vs manual estimate 650 days.

• Able to re-provision environments in less than 60 minutes.

• Slashed time to release by 93% from 4 hours to 15 minutes.

• 90%+ reduction in defects caused by configuration issues.

‍

Platform-as-a-Service for Oracle Middleware

Inland Revenue (IR) is undertaking an organization-wide business transformation program to modernize its revenue service. Fundamental to this transformation, is a project to replace the end-of-life middleware software that manages about 90% of Inland Revenue’s data. Given the potential business impact derived from success, Inland Revenue adopted an innovative continuous development approach, underpinned by a private Middleware Platform as a Service for Oracle Middleware running on Oracle Exalogic. With Sun Java Composite Application Platform (Java CAPS or JCAPS) facing end of life at the end of 2016, IR decided to migrate from JCAPS to Oracle Fusion Middleware (OFM) 11g/12c.

Inland Revenue engaged DeloitteAsparona as the implementation partner for this large project and adopted MyST to automate the platform provisioning, code build and deployment aspects of the project. With dual focus on minimizing risk and cost, IR had an enterprise mandate to lift and shift where possible onto the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud platform running Oracle Fusion Middleware. In addition, to meet the aggressive timelines, the project team adopted a DevOps model for Continuous Development and developed an innovative multi-phased approach for decommissioning the JCAPs environment.

‍

Automated Platform Provisioning

Inland Revenue adopted MyST to deliver a Private Middleware Platform as a Service (PaaS) running on Oracle Exalogic to quickly and consistently provision the large scale Oracle technology environments. With 9 distinct environments spanning Development, Test (Component, System, Integration, User Acceptance and QA) and dual production sites, encompassing 65 domains and 9 Web tiers, the ability to reliably and repeatedly create, destroy and refresh environments is paramount. This is critical to ensure consistent configuration of all environments, to prevent issues due to configuration differences and to ensure non-prod environments are re-synched with Prod, after each production release to ensure future releases are compatible with the current release.

Inland Revenue’s business requirements necessitate functionality from SOA Suite 11g and 12c and therefore the topology needed to support multiple versions of Oracle WebLogic and Oracle SOA Suite. MyST fully automates the provisioning and refresh of all environments plus ongoing configuration management. With 2-3 production deployments each month, the Platform Blueprint used to define a standardized topology across all environments, is critical to providing governance and consistency and eliminating configuration drift across all phases of the development cycle.

‍

Continuous Build and Deployment

Historically, Inland Revenue has used a traditional waterfall method of software design where large manual testing efforts come in the latter phases of the project. Facing an aggressive timeline and so much at stake with this project, DeloitteAsparona

recommended a DevOps model for Continuous Development, leveraging the Deloitte Methodology – Enterprise Value Delivery. To further support this DevOps approach, IR adopted MyST for continuous build and deployment. Using the MyST Continuous Delivery module to automate the build and deployment of 500-1000 services in each environment, IR has slashed release time from 4+ hours to approximately 15 minutes. With 1300+ releases each year across all environments, this delivers a significant cost saving upwards of 650 person-days, compared to a manual build process. Using MyST, IR has also seen a reduction in the number of deployment configuration issues, by as much as 90%, which significantly reduces the time spent troubleshooting failed releases.

In addition, by automating the build and deployment process, IR are saving over 800 person-hours in idle time, as the test team no longer has to wait for new releases to be deployed, to test environments.

A Powerful Partnership

The partnership between Inland Revenue, DeloitteAsparona and Rubicon Red has proven to be very successful, providing the project team the tools and infrastructure needed to rapidly and consistently provision environments and deliver higher quality releases, more quickly.

‍

Result

With MyST, Inland Revenue is able to provision a highly complex Oracle middleware platform across 9 environments, and automate the build, deployment and configuration of over 500 services. All at the push of a button.

Using MyST, Inland Revenue has transformed what was a resource intensive, error prone process into an automated, predictable, low risk software delivery process. This has enabled Inland Revenue to meet the aggressive timelines for their JCAPs migration, and provides a solid foundation from which they can confidently launch the next phase of their business transformation to modernize their revenue service.