Automotive company shifts into high gear with Oracle Cloud infrastructure

Security, scalability, flexibility and lower licensing costs were the main reasons why one of Norway's largest car dealerships moved its IT systems to the cloud - to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Cegal provided expertise in Oracle and cloud technology to assist with the cloud migration and is now the new operating partner.

Cegal has assisted one of Norway's largest automotive companies with a "lift-and-shift" project where legacy data systems and IT infrastructure have been replaced with a modern, secure and flexible cloud platform. The automotive business imports, sells new and used cars and has dealerships and workshops across the country. Globally, the group is known for its high quality, production methodology and just-in-time delivery model.

To create a foundation that supports the high business goals, the Norwegian automotive company develops most of the critical IT systems internally. IT solutions handle a variety of complex processes and are used by the entire dealer network. The systems handle everything from ordering cars from factories around the world, booking workshop hours, handling car parts with just-in-time delivery, credit assessment, financing and insurance, to customer service in the aftermarket. 

To increase IT security and have a modern, scalable and flexible IT platform that can handle ever-changing business requirements and demands from quality-conscious customers, the company has moved its IT systems to the cloud - to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). 

Without OCI, not a single new car is sold, used car, workshop appointment booked or other service performed. The OCI platform is the foundation of the business. OCI enables the automotive company to meet the demands of increasing digitization, automated services and more. OCI was also chosen because the cloud platform would give the company lower licensing costs.

From mainframe to cloud

Cegal has been working with the business for several years. It started with assistance in modernizing, streamlining and upgrading Oracle's databases. Now Cegal has helped to phase out the last mainframe and move the business applications to the cloud - a classic lift-and-shift project from on-prem to OCI. The mainframe has played a critical role as a platform for several business-critical systems.

- We have a clear cloud strategy. Retailers and customers have ever-increasing expectations that systems are up and running 24 hours a day, seven days a week all year. Previously, we could take systems down for maintenance and upgrades. We can do that less and less. The digitization of our services, connected cars, greater customer expectations, along with other trends, mean that we need to move to the cloud for flexibility, faster development of new services and, not least, increased security," says the company's IT director.

We wanted greater flexibility, increased security and the ability to develop new services more quickly, and now we have that.

Company's IT director

He gives an example: today, customers expect to be able to book a workshop appointment at any time of the day or night and receive confirmation that the service they have booked will be carried out at the given time.

As part of the cloud migration, Cegal has assisted with consulting services, license advice, Oracle expertise, analysis, development and design in tandem with the company's own developers. Cegal has also taken over the operation of the Oracle Cloud platform with applications and services.

Cegal has operational responsibility for the entire setup, with machines, applications, databases, and more. The Cegal team is proactive. The IT director emphasizes that it is important to have a partner that has overall responsibility for the entire setup.

With Cegal as a partner, we get faster and better support than we did before. Our team matches very well with Cegal's team.

Company's IT director

Cloud migration yields good results

• Lower license costs.
• A secure, stable and scalable platform for the Norwegian dealer systems.
• 24/7 uptime for all customer systems.
• Access to modern management solutions that provide more efficient operations and enable automation.

Among other things, Cegal consultants have helped the automotive company identify differences between available and required data sets and reports, analyze and integrate data from alternative sources, evaluate and adjust business rules for compatibility with the new system, transfer mainframe functionality to modern dashboards, and migrate from mainframe to modern cloud platform. These include Kubernetes, OCI Streaming, OCI Buckets and PostgreSQL databases. This has made it possible to take advantage of Kubernetes and a number of managed cloud services in our development projects, concludes the IT director.

Cegal has also conducted several workshops to train developers in Kafka development, containerization of applications, cloud-based development tools and centralized logging. Among other things, this has led to the automation of various IT services and the improvement of DevOps practices.