Infratects News Letter no. 3

With the largest single EPM market in the EMEA region, the UK has always been an important part of the Oracle | Hyperion EPM world.

Infratects Consulting Ltd is our first joint-venture outside of the Netherlands between Phil Noble, former head of EPM Technical Consulting for Oracle, and Infratects B.V.
In our very brief history (we opened in November 2009) we have managed to attract some excellent resources, John Pegrum and Vinesh Unalkat (both Senior EPM Technical Consultants) and we hope to be announcing another new hire shortly.

The combined strength of experienced local Senior Consultants in the UK and a developed services base and back-up team of Senior Consultants in the Netherlands gives Infratects Consulting Ltd the best possible start to be able to offer a wide range of services and products in a marketplace where we have traditionally been more reactive than proactive.

Should you have a local consulting requirement in the UK that requires immediate attention please feel free to contact us directly on ukinfo@infratects.com.

For a brief summary of what Infratects Consulting can offer please click on the link below.

As with a lot of client introductions, our first contact with Lihir resulted from a call from their functional consultancy, because they were experiencing performance issues, and wanted a review of their technical infrastructure.

Although booked for a five-day review and remediation engagement, after having spent a day looking at the environment, it became clear that there were serious issues that needed to be addressed that could not be addressed immediately, namely:

• A combined HFM/Shared Services Database
• A limted-resource Virtual Machine
• Limited underlying physical hardware

As a result of these findings the review was abandoned and the second day was spent producing a decision paper, that allowed Lihir to make a clear choice between re-building the environment on existing versions on a new Virtual Machine, re-building the environment on new versions on a new Virtual Machine, or attempting to re-build the environment on the existing Virtual Machine with additional physical resources.

All options were clearly described in terms of our effort/cost, their IT departments' effort, and associated additional costs. The benefits of each approach and its' associated risks were also described.

The decision to re-build the environment with new versions on a new Virtual Machine was forthcoming on the third day, and the rest of the day was spent preparing detailed service requests for the IT department, enabling them to prepare the Virtual Machine and environmenment perfectly for the Oracle EPM Suite.

The existing engagement was then cut-short (to maximise the available budget for the later re-build) and three weeks later a new engagement was completed, resulting in the upgraded environment with all content moved and all actions documented.

So whats' so special about this customer story?

Absolutely nothing.

What it clearly demonstrates is our ethos, in trying to help our clients get the best possible advice, make informed decisions and spend only on what makes sense for them.

A full customer story about this engagement (written by the client) will be forthcoming later this year. In the meantime, if you would like to take a look at some of our other customer stories, please feel free to follow the link below.

With over 10 years experience in the IT industry, the last 7 of which were spent working for Hyperion|Oracle, Raymond brings a wealth of experience to the Infratects Team in the Netherlands.

During his seven years at Oracle|Hyperion, Raymond held a number of roles, rising from technical consultant, pre-sales consultant through to Hyperion architect, team leader and technical project leader to become infrastructure practice manager.

His first mutual engagement with Infratects was a Hyperion EPM Suite proof of concept implementation at Essent in August 2003.

His Infrastructure Practice Manager role at Hyperion|Oracle prepared him perfectly for the Business Development Manager role at Infratects, providing him with both the management experience and customer and partner contact that are essential in ensuring that Infratects is correctly positioned to provide new and existing clients with the breadth and depth of advice required to support the implementation, management, outsourcing and performance tuning of complex EPM environments.

Raymond has a busy year ahead of him, helping us develop our relationships with partners, suppliers and clients.

We hope you will join us in welcoming Raymond to the Infratects Team!