Cegal helped getting Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s Oracle platform in the cloud

While Wallenius Wilhelmsen’s 130 RoRo ships glides over the world’s oceans, large amounts of data are streamed to the cloud. Read more about how Cegal’s consultants have helped Wallenius Wilhelmsen on their cloud journey.  

Wallenius Wilhelmsen is a leading, global provider of logistics services where 130 RoRo ships make the core business. RoRo is short for “Roll-on Roll-off”. RoRo ships carry goods that either drive on board or are rolled into place on a platform.  

Wallenius Wilhelmsen has been central in the development of what has become the standard for RoRo ships. Every year, the group transports around 5.5 million cars, trains, trucks, agricultural machinery, various special vehicles, and other goods at sea and on land. The vehicles can be up to 6.1 meters high, 12 meters long and weigh up to 400 tonnes. A single ship can have up to 8.000 cars on board. The company has nine port terminals on six continents and 38 logistics centers on land. 

Cloud migration for digital transformation 

Computer systems and data collection are of course essential to have an overview of such an extensive logistics business. Access to data and information is crucial, for example, to provide customers with accurate information about where the vehicles and other goods are located and when they're ready for the next step in the logistics chain.  

Wallenius Wilhelmsen has for many years been a major user of Oracle’s solutions and platforms. The Oracle systems play a crucial role in supporting the company´s critical core applications.  

A few years ago, Wallenius Wilhelmsen made a strategic choice to move all IT systems on the cloud by migrating to IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) instead of having IT systems and solutions locally (on-prem). The migration to cloud is part of a larger transformation and digitization program in the company.  

“Migrating all systems to the cloud means that IT can better support our vision of digitization and the establishment of new, digital services”

Håvard Melgaard, Wallenius Wilhelmsen  

Collaboration since 2017 

The cloud migration of the Oracle systems was the reason why Wallenius Wilhelmsen contacted Cegal in 2017.  

“We needed expertise around our older and expensive Oracle systems that we had on-prem with the operating supplier”, says Håvard Melgaard, Vice President Global Sourcing & Partners – Digital & IT in Wallenius Wilhelmsen.  

Cegal’s Oracle experts have from the beginning been an important advisor and solved more and more tasks; from areas such as licensing the operation and support services of the platforms. The cloud migration has been a “lift and shift project” where planning, establishment and migration had to be run without downtime or service interruptions.  

“The most central part in our cloud journey is Microsoft Azure, which is our strategic cloud platform, while Oracle Cloud supports our legacy core systems”, says Melgaard and continues:  

“Together we have gained many experiences along the way. Cegal has been an important partner and supported us around our Oracle environment. Both in the design and establishment of Oracle’s cloud solutions so that they are best adapted to our needs. At the same time, Cegal has played a key role between Oracle and its existing outsourcing and operating partner and managed to bring the first part of the cloud journey safely into shore.” 

There have not been any challenges for “Norwegian” Cegal to assist Wallenius Wilhelmsen, which is a worldwide group with a global IT organization.  

“We have a lot of expertise internally. With Cegal on our team we get experienced ‘mountain people’ on the team and more capacity, width, and Oracle resources.”

Håvard Melgaard, Wallenius Wilhelmsen 

“We are satisfied with what Cegal has delivered. Cegal puts the customer first, delivers according to a well-developed framework, while at the same time facilitating the necessary flexibility”, Melgaard continues

Continuous development and digitization 

Since the beginning, Wallenius Wilhelmsen has continuously developed and improved the logistics services in close collaboration with customers. Today, digitization and the use of modern technology are at the core of the company’s future strategy.  

“Technology and digital services make it possible to streamline operations and value chains, and to deliver integrated and automated services to our customers and partners. This increases the value of our services with our partners. In addition, technology helps us develop new solutions together with our customers that enable us to move towards a logistics chain with zero greenhouse gas emissions”, says Melgaard and highlights Wallenius Wilhemsen´s vision: “Sustainable logistics for a world in motion”.  

Facts about the Oracle project at Wallenius Wilhelmsen 

In the fall of 2019, Wallenius Wilhelmsen and Cegal started moving the database solution from Oracle ExaData on-prem to Oracle ExaData Cloud. Cegal helped with both the preliminary project and the main project. With the cloud solution Oracle ExaData Cloud, Wallenius Wilhelmsen got rid of both old hardware, large operating costs, and expensive licenses. Wallenius went live with the Oracle ExaData Cloud Service in April 2020.  

Cegal is an Oracle Trusted Advisor, who can deliver key expertise in all areas around Oracle. In 2021, Wallenius Wilhelmsen entered into an extended Managed Services agreement on Hubro services, where Cegal assists Wallenius with monitoring, operation, and support of important solutions on the Oracle middleware platform and database platform.