NRMA migrates to Oracle cloud to create a more robust infrastructure

The National Roads and Motorists’ Association (NRMA) is Australia’s largest member organization, providing a range of products and services for members and the community that includes roadside assistance, international driver’s licenses, car reviews, and a diverse range of motoring, travel, and lifestyle benefits. The NRMA is driven by the desire to keep people moving. With roadside assistance at its core, it has helped people for more than one hundred years. Now, as the world changes, it is reimagining the way people move.

As cars become more reliable, the NRMA has been working to expand its member offerings beyond just roadside assistance, to continue delivering value.

Transforming technology to deliver customer experience

NRMA has focused on three key areas of growth. It is addressing its service offerings by investigating new products and ideas for its existing membership base, it is working to make its existing product more relevant to customers and prospects, and it is diversifying into other transportation business lines.

“When it comes to customer service, NRMA is working to grow further our existing digital-ready footprint,” says Maroun Azzi, General Manager Technology, Membership and Motoring at NRMA. “This means creating experiences with our customers across multiple demographics. The goal is to allow all customers to interact with NRMA in a more seamless fashion using the digital channels they are used to. Rather than picking up a phone and having a conversation, they have other options.”

Reimagining the customer experience

NRMA had high infrastructure operational costs and scaling its platform would be time-consuming and expensive, with little agility to respond to market changes quickly. Working with long-time partner Capgemini, NRMA decided to move to the cloud to better support its priorities. The partners created a solution focused on business continuity, scalability, automation, security, and support, all connected to NRMA’s guidance on IT priorities and the power to deliver the right experience. NRMA chose to work with Capgemini because of its proven expertise on the Oracle technology stack and its status as an Oracle-recommended partner.

NRMA hosted its Oracle Databases on Oracle Engineered Systems but these were nearing their end of life and extending the on-premises infrastructure-hosting contract would have been costly. With eight different Oracle Business applications and nine different environments, NRMA needed to migrate the Oracle application and systems stack to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) to truly transform and be more responsive.

Starting the cloud journey

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is NRMA’s core finance application. NRMA wanted to move the EBS application to a highly automated and scalable cloud model while reducing the total cost of operation. Starting in May 2020, NRMA, Capgemini, and Oracle started the journey to move EBS to OCI.

“Our partnership with Capgemini has enabled us to not only establish our platforms but also to provide for our business in an agile fashion for customer requirements,” says Azzi. “It has been a very collaborative approach and our turnaround time has decreased. We can rely on Capgemini for expertise on the technology side to help us make the right choices and decisions.”

With the successful migration of EBS in October 2020, NRMA completed the full migration to OCI for eight different applications as well as nine environments, including production. A highly automated, Infrastructure-as-Code tool was developed to provision, manage, and govern the OCI platform. The stack of Oracle applications migrated and set-up included multiple environments of SIT, NFT, production, and disaster recovery as well as non-priority environments in progress, such as Dev, SIT2, training, and production support.

This migration also required NRMA and Capgemini to run a complete project cycle with functional and non-functional performance, Disaster Recovery (DR) testing, and go-live cutover activities. The result was an end-to-end, on-premises cloud migration within eight months.

Despite the project complexities and challenges, NRMA and Capgemini worked together with Oracle to deliver the entire project from conceptualization to go-live within the projected timeframe and on budget, even with the challenges the pandemic presented.

The migration is already delivering significant benefits to NRMA on multiple levels, including reducing infrastructure overhead, allowing the freedom to shift to a pay-as-you-go model, delivering resources that can be scaled on the fly, and providing the ability to set-up a multi-region infrastructure.

A more digital future

NRMA and Capgemini are continuing to work on migrating non-Oracle on-premises applications to OCI to provide the flexibility of the cloud to all areas of the business. The project is expected to be completed in 2021.

“NRMA is enabling more digital self-service capabilities for customers as well as using data and personalization,” says Azzi. “We are also trying to have more recurring, meaningful conversations around their life events rather than having a once-a-year subscription-renewal business transaction.”

Smartphones are also driving transformation. Australia has one of the largest smartphone penetrations in the world, which means customers expect information at their fingertips when they need it wherever they are. Customers will not tolerate a 10-minute wait to speak to an agent anymore. NRMA needed to provide information about its products and services to customers at their chosen points.

“NRMA has built the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure with three goals in mind. Firstly, run mission-critical workloads in the cloud with increased performance and decreased CapEx. Secondly, build the infrastructure with enhanced security. Finally, bring scalability and flexibility into the business applications. That has allowed complete control and confidence,” says San Fernando, Senior Manager Infrastructure and Database, Membership and Motoring at NRMA.

Migrating to OCI gives NRMA the platform to develop new experiences quickly and at scale. Being more responsive to changing demographics and a shifting client base, NRMA will respond faster to customer preferences and market disruptions while better managing costs in operating expenses compared to upfront capital-expenditure outlays.