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OR Oracle Energy Europe

SEFE

Data Lake / Data Warehouse Modernization · Security and Compliance · System Migration

SEFE—an international energy company supplying 50,000+ clients with 200+ TWh of gas and power per year—needed to exit on-premises data centers and migrate 39 databases supporting 13 business-critical applications, including CRM and metering, from legacy IBM hardware to Azure while preserving Oracle RAC, performance, and EU GDPR data-residency compliance.

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20% improvement in application and database performance
20%–45% business-process performance improvements
200+ TWh of gas and power per year
39 databases supporting 13 business-critical applications migrated

Solution

SEFE, a leading European energy company supplying 50K+ clients with 200+ TWh of gas and power annually, migrated 39 databases supporting 13 business-critical applications (CRM, metering, trading) from legacy IBM hardware to Oracle Database@Azure, achieving 20–45% performance improvements while meeting strict EU data residency and GDPR compliance requirements. The solution unified Microsoft Azure infrastructure investments with Exadata database performance, provided Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) for zero-downtime operations during Europe's volatile energy market, and enabled rapid disaster recovery migration to Paris.

Data flow

Energy trading transactions, customer CRM data, and meter readings from 50K+ clients → Oracle Database@Azure → Real Application Clusters for HA → disaster recovery replication to Paris AZ via GoldenGate; EU GDPR compliance maintained through regional data residency.

Solution architecture

4 components · 3 layers
  1. Compute
    • Oracle Exadata Database Service High-performance database engine providing advanced compression and query optimization for large-scale energy trading and metering data.
  2. Storage
    • Oracle Database@Azure Co-located OCI Exadata services within Azure data centers; runs 13 business-critical applications (CRM, metering, trading) with 20–45% performance improvement over legacy IBM systems.
    • Oracle Real Application Clusters High-availability clustering for business-critical systems; enabled zero-downtime patching and disaster recovery switching to Paris availability zone.
  3. Orchestration
    • Oracle Zero Downtime Migration Minimized downtime during migration of 39 databases from IBM on-premises infrastructure to Azure cloud.

Architecture clues

  • Accenture for OCI and Avanade for Azure as implementation partners
  • Disaster recovery moved from UK to Paris availability zone for GDPR alignment
  • Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitments (MACC) used to consume Oracle services
  • Oracle Database@Azure: OCI Exadata co-located in Azure data centers
  • Oracle RAC for business-critical systems
  • Zero Downtime Migration during transition

Evidence from the source

Migrate 39 databases supporting 13 business-critical applications—including its CRM and metering systems—from legacy IBM hardware to Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (VMs).
SEFE's migration of core workloads to Oracle Database@Azure resulted in a 20% improvement in application and database performance.
We saw business-process performance improvements of 20% to 45%, exceeding our ROI projections.

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