Cytiva’s Oracle EBS footprint
In 2020, Danaher Corporation, a Fortune 500 conglomerate, acquired the biopharma business from GE Life Sciences, which became Cytiva. The acquisition of this multi-billion a year business presented key opportunities for Danaher, which had a vision to significantly grow the business. The acquisition also posed key challenges from an IT perspective.
Cytiva is a global provider of technologies and services that advance and accelerate the development and manufacture of therapeutics. Cytiva’s customers undertake life-saving activities ranging from fundamental biological research to developing innovative vaccines, biologic drugs, and novel cell and gene therapies. In fact, Cytiva recently formed a collaboration with another pharma company to help accelerate manufacturing of COVID-19 vaccines and antibody therapies.
With operations in 40 countries and territories covering Europe, Asia, North and Latin America, and the Middle East, the customer has a very extensive Oracle EBS footprint – a global single instance including financials, order management, manufacturing, and other modules that manage approximately 10 terabytes of data across 15 manufacturing locations worldwide. Not only did this system require maximum uptime, availability, and scalability to support Cytiva’s growth, but upon the completion of the acquisition, that data remained in GE’s on-premise data centers. Post transaction, they faced nearly $5 million annually in fees to maintain the data on GE’s infrastructure until they could successfully transition out of their data centers. The pressure was on for IT leadership to move quickly.
The nitty-gritty
Oracle Products
- Oracle E-Business Suite
- Oracle Exadata Cloud Service
Workloads
- Oracle E-Business Suite
- Oracle Database and Custom Applications
Solution
At the time of the Cytiva acquisition, James Cornell, now Senior Director of Enterprise Technology Solutions at Cytiva, was the ERP delivery team lead for one of Danaher’s largest operating companies, Beckman Coulter. While there, James had worked with Centroid to migrate their Oracle E-Business Suite backoffice operations to Exadata Cloud Services in OCI.
So when James was recruited to lead Cytiva’s ERP delivery systems, he again partnered with Centroid, who advised moving Cytiva’s EBS and Oracle workloads from GE’s on-premise data centers to Exadata Cloud Services in order to quickly achieve independence from GE’s infrastructure and support the scalability needed to rapidly grow Cytiva’s business.
“We have very demanding requirements with global 24/7 operations and need maximum uptime and maximum scalability to enable the business to execute their strategies.”
James Cornell, Senior Director Enterprise Technology Solutions at Cytiva
The migration to the cloud was a two-step process. First, Cytiva moved its databases into an existing on-premise Exadata in a Danaher data center while putting the E-Business application tier in the Oracle Cloud. This initial step allowed Cytiva to rapidly migrate its data off of GE’s systems and eliminated the need to provision new servers. And with both the Danaher data center and Oracle Cloud region located in Phoenix, the close proximity created a low-latency, high-bandwidth connection between the cloud and on-premise data center. In step two of the migration, Cytiva moved its databases out of the Danaher data center and completely into the Exadata Cloud Service in OCI.
Results
From start to finish, it took just 9½ months to move EBS from GE’s servers to OCI, an impressively fast migration that saved Cytiva over $6 million dollars. In addition, the move from the on-premise data center to Oracle Cloud saved the company $1 million in hardware and real estate costs annually.
Perhaps more importantly, with EBS backoffice operations in the cloud, Cytiva’s business operations can now scale to support an aggressive expansion and acquisition strategy and quickly adapt to new business opportunities.
“Following our success in migrating to and leveraging Oracle Cloud, Cytiva is now the largest operating company within Danaher and we want to continue our momentum.”
– James Cornell, Senior Director Enterprise Technology Solutions at Cytiva
“By getting onto the cloud and being on the Exadata Cloud Service platform, we can now provide additional strategic value to the business,” said Cornell. After moving from Oracle Exadata on-premise to Exadata Cloud Service, Cytiva has seen over 60% performance improvement on batch job running times by doing nothing more than moving to the cloud.
Added flexibility from the cloud now enables Cytiva’s IT team to stand up new environments in a fraction of the time – from months to hours – compared to its on-premise solution, which is key to Cytiva’s growth and acquisition strategy. IT staff and resources can now be redirected to more strategic goals that support the expansion of the business.