Estuate Helps Leading
Mining Company Dig for
Savings with IBM Optim
CHALLENGE
After growing its company through mergers and acquisitions, a leading mining company found itself with several
redundant instances of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). Hoping to eliminate the cost of maintaining these instances,
the company wanted to retire them while maintaining access to several years’ worth of company data.
SOLUTION
Estuate implemented the IBM Optim Data Growth Solution, retired the company’s unneeded instances of Oracle
E-Business Suite, archived all the data from the applications, and delivered a reporting capability for the retired data.
RESULTS
Using application retirement best practices, the mining company and Estuate:
 Retired three older instances of Oracle EBS.
 Consolidated the enterprise on one production instance of Oracle EBS.
 Maintained access to 4-5 years’ worth of archived corporate data.
 Finished a projected seven-week project in two weeks.
 Reduced storage requirements, processing times, and projected future hardware requirements.

MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS LEAVE COMPANY WITH REDUNDANT BUSINESS APPLICATIONS
A U.S.-based mining company is a major primary silver Suite applications—and corresponding databases—left
producer and growing gold producer. The company over from previous implementations.
operates three new, large precious metals mines that These redundant applications presented two problems.
generate significant production, sales, and cash flow in First of all, they added to the cost, risk, and complexity of
continued strong metals markets. managing the company’s IT infrastructure. Second, they
How did the company come to lead its market? Much of left the company vulnerable to potential compliance issues
its growth was driven by mergers and acquisitions—in related to data retention. Rather than simply accept these
particular, by a pair of 2007 acquisitions that dramatically problems as part of the cost of doing business, the
increased its silver production. But although the company took action.
company’s acquisitions have given it a competitive “Many companies simply continue to keep their old
advantage, they have also presented its IT team with applications in production because they need to maintain
challenges in managing corporate applications and data. access to the data,” explains Marc Hebert, chief operating
The company recently assessed its business officer, Estuate. “But this is an inefficient and expensive
applications and found it was running multiple instances strategy that wastes precious IT budget. This leading
of Oracle E-Business Suite, including versions 10.7 v7, mining company took a proactive approach by seeking to
10.7 v8, 11.5.8 v8, and 11.5.9 v8. The company also retire redundant instances of its Oracle E-Business Suite.”
discovered numerous abandoned Oracle E-Business
IBM’S “GO-TO” CONSULTING FIRM GUIDES APPLICATION RETIREMENT
The mining company began to look for an application At the suggestion of IBM, the company engaged Estuate
decommissioning solution that could not only help it to implement Optim and guide the application
consolidate its operations on one version of Oracle E- decommissioning process. Estuate came into the project
Business Suite, but also allow business users to maintain with significant experience in application retirement.
access to historical data. Any potential solution would need
“We’ve executed a number of decommissioning projects
to archive older data in a way that made it searchable in
involving Oracle E-Business Suite,” Hebert remarks.
the event of legal or regulatory challenges.
“Oftentimes, the different instances are running on
®
The company ultimately chose IBM Optim™, a solution different hardware platforms, and require a great deal of
designed to make application retirement easier and safer hardware, software, and labor costs to maintain. One of
by providing the capability to archive data in its original the main advantages of using IBM Optim to retire
business context. During the archiving process, Optim applications is that it ensures application data will remain
preserves each archived business object as an audit-ready accessible to our clients’ reporting tools of choice.”
“snapshot in time.” Optim also provides specific archive
and retrieval capabilities that address data retention
compliance needs, allowing organizations to effectively
implement their decommissioning projects.
2 www.estuate.com - t: 408.400.0680

ARCHIVED APPLICATIONS AND DATA REMAIN ACCESSIBLE TO EMPLOYEES
Heading into the project, Estuate planned to take seven weeks to
implement the IBM Optim data growth solution. But using Estuate’s
ABOUT ESTUATE
proven methodology, Estuate and the mining company completed the
Headquartered in Silicon Valley,
project in just two weeks—despite the complexity of consolidating
Estuate is a global information
data from several disused databases. In the process, Estuate
technology services company that
decommissioned outdated versions of Oracle E-Business Suite, and
specializes in helping companies
archived all data from the retired applications into one common
establish and improve enterprise data
archived repository.
management strategies and best
Estuate also put IBM Optim Open Data Manager in place to allow practices.
access to the archive file repository. As a result, the mining company
Estuate is IBM’s go-to partner for the
can use Oracle Discoverer for ad hoc querying and reporting of the
®
implementation of IBM Optim
archived data.
Solutions for custom applications,
Having retired several instances and consolidated its IT footprint,
Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft,
what benefits will the company experience in the years to come? Siebel and JD Edwards. We have
Employees now have one place to go for four to five years’ worth of expertise on distributed platforms and
historical data, which will streamline research for legal or regulatory
IBM mainframes. Estuate was one of
issues. Because that data has been removed from the main the early partners involved in the
production database and is now archived in a compact format, the Oracle-to-DB2 migration program. We
company has reduced its storage requirements, processing times,
work closely with IBM account teams
and projected future hardware requirements. to meet our mutual clients' Enterprise
“Any time a corporation can avoid running multiple application Data Management needs.
instances in today’s complex IT environment, it’s a clear win,” Hebert
For more information contact:
concludes. “Because IBM Optim provides everything a company Marc Hebert,
needs to archive applications and their data in a compact yet highly- Estuate’s COO
accessible format, there’s no reason not to explore the benefits of
marc@estuate.com
application retirement. The investment you make up front today T: 510-468-7132
translates to clear savings down the road.”
3 www.estuate.com - t: 408.400.0680