Case Study | Tidal

Optus Transforms with Tidal

Optus is one of the largest telecommunications companies in Australia. Much more than a leader in telecommunications, Optus provides mobile, telephony, internet, satellite, entertainment, and business network services to more than 10 million customers each day. Optus owns and operates its own network and also resells its network capacity to other carrier brands.

The Challenge

Faced with multiple legacy applications running on Oracle databases, Optus has struggled to make a cost-effective business case for moving to the cloud. Building a solid business case for a move to the cloud was challenging as a lift and shift migration had to compete with the company’s low cost structure and cost allocation methodology.

Cloud POCs had been completed successfully by Optus, but they considered lift and shift of the same platforms and did not optimize licensing costs or demonstrate the savings needed for a broader cloud initiative.

The Optus team understood that continued delays in modernizing could lock Optus into increasing technical debt and prevent the agility, scalability, and cost savings that are possible via the deployment of applications in cloud native architectures.

With an eye on a different approach, Optus requested Tidal to analyze a subset of their application portfolio and demonstrate potential gains and efficient use of the cloud via database replatforming and/or application refactoring to open sources and cloud native services/architectures.

The Solution

Tidal provided an Optimization and Licensing Assessment to assess a subset of the Optus application portfolio to determine the migration readiness and disposition recommendation for those applications for deployment in AWS. Using the Tidal platform,proprietary discovery tools, and a data-driven migration methodology, Tidal was able to analyze key application and infrastructure data to make informed 6R disposition and reference architecture recommendations.

The Details

The key information collected included

Key infrastructure information associated with application and database servers and their dependencies;
Application source code and database analyses to determine migration difficulty;
OS and Database licensing data to inform the optimum licensing treatment within AWS EC2 and RDS instances; and
Application owner provided information via interviews.

Tidal compared relative performance of the customer’s on-prem servers with AWS instance options (on a normalized performance index) in order to recommend the lowest cost, EC2 instance that would yield equal or better performance. This optimized instance matching incorporated the following factors: normalized CPU performance, memory usage, operating system, license portability, and cost.

Using Tidal’s analysis tools, the project team could quickly identify and understand migration blockers and recommend cost-effective cloud cloud architectures. For example, the team could identify which Oracle databases could be migrated to PostgreSQL running on RDS and which features would need to be addressed during a migration. Additionally, the application source code analysis allowed the team to quickly identify transformations such as Java/Tomcat on RHEL VMs, Spring Boot Framework running on Oracle to Java/Tomcat on Containers, Spring Boot, Beanstalk container for Tomcat platform, PostgreSQL on RDS.

The Results

Using Tidal’s transformative cloud migration approach, Optus was able to reconsider their approach to cloud migration, and for the first time, make a positive business case pointing to a migration to the cloud. Even compared against Optus’ very low internal costs and allocation, a cloud-native migration was shown to yield more than 20% in annual hosting costs.

Further, a migration with modernization will reduce maintenance costs and complexity while increasing resilience and modernization agility over and above the direct quantified savings. This includes the efforts currently expended for managed backups and restore, database administration, patching and upgrade efforts.

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