Penske Australia and New Zealand

A subsidiary of the Penske Automotive Group, a U.S.-based Fortune 500 company, Penske Australia & New Zealand distributes commercial vehicles, diesel engines, gas engines, power systems and related parts across the region.

For years, the company used Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) as its primary financial management system. But following an acquisition in 2014, Penske Australia & New Zealand decided to move to an industry-specific enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

Following this change, Oracle EBS went from being the ERP of record for thousands of employees to a system that only needed to be accessed occasionally for historical purposes. It had become stagnant and increasingly expensive to maintain as time went on.

Bobby Stojceski, chief security officer at Penske Australia & New Zealand, knew he had to do something to reduce costs—but simply getting rid of Oracle EBS wasn’t an option.

“Australian tax laws mandate that we keep tax invoices, purchase orders and other financial records in Oracle EBS for seven years,” Stojceski said. “We had a legal requirement to continue operating the system, but we knew we couldn’t keep it on-premises because it was too costly to maintain. We needed to migrate Oracle EBS onto another platform, but we didn’t have the in-house skills or expertise to know where to migrate it or how to execute the process.”

Stojceski ended up reaching out to several partners, and Navisite was one of the companies recommended for the job. The Navisite team proposed moving Oracle EBS onto Amazon Web Services (AWS), with Navisite engineers managing the cloud migration.

“It only took one conversation for me to know that Navisite was the partner for us,” said Stojceski. “It was instantly clear that they have deep knowledge of Oracle and AWS. And they were the only team we spoke to that exuded confidence that the project would be done on time and on budget. In fact, they promised to complete the migration in six weeks, which was five times faster than I thought the migration would take—and they delivered.”

Navisite’s team kicked off the project with an Oracle EBS infrastructure assessment and then developed a migration plan and AWS environment right-sized for the company’s needs. Next came the migration phase, with Navisite’s engineers migrating Oracle off of expensive hardware and onto AWS servers.

Now, instead of managing a large cluster of servers built for thousands of Oracle EBS users, Penske Australia & New Zealand has scaled back to a single database server, application server and web server—more than enough resources to accommodate the two users that still require Oracle EBS access.

Navisite completed the Oracle to AWS migration on time and on budget. Most importantly, Penske Australia & New Zealand is now saving approximately $80,000 annually—more than $60,000 in hardware maintenance costs and nearly $20,000 in power consumption costs by reducing its data center footprint. Additionally, Navisite is helping to further reduce costs by guiding the company through an AWS cost optimization analysis.

Aside from these savings, the Oracle migration and downsizing have had an enormous impact on the day-to-day duties of IT staff. Stojceski and his team can now focus on important IT initiatives that deliver business value, rather than spending time and resources worrying about managing a massive legacy system.

“The migration process was as painless as Navisite portrayed it to be,” said Stojceski. “And now that AWS is part of our environment, we’re seeing more capabilities that we could use in AWS that we didn’t have available to us before.”

Stojceski noted that a key reason for the project’s success was Navisite’s exceptional support and globally dispersed team.

“I don’t think Navisite’s engineers sleep. Any time that I reached out to the team, I received a response within hours. From their technical expertise and support to their strong relationship with AWS, Navisite exceeded our expectations across the board and enabled a smooth migration of Oracle EBS to AWS in the process.”