Circuit Maker Moves from Oracle and UNIX to Microsoft ...



Overview

Country or Region: United States

Industry: Information technology

Customer Profile

Altera, based in San Jose, California, is a global provider of programmable logic devices and the software used to customize them for electronics.

Business Situation

Altera was upgrading its Siebel business applications enterprise software and was evaluating new operating system and database software that could support the new Siebel functionality.

Solution

The company replaced its UNIX-based Oracle software with the Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 operating system and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database to support its new Siebel business applications.

Benefits

■ Deployment of complex system easily handled

■ New solution provides improved performance

■ System can provide support for new features in future

| | |“The success that we’ve experienced … really speaks to the quality of service and the quality of product that Microsoft and Siebel have provided.”

Bill Levesque, Program Director, Customer Information Systems, Altera

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| | | |Altera Corporation is a leading global manufacturer of programmable logic chips that are used in a |

| | | |wide array of electronic products and components. When the San Jose, California–based company decided|

| | | |to upgrade its Siebel business applications enterprise system, it also reevaluated the underlying |

| | | |operating system and database used to support Siebel. Altera chose to replace its UNIX operating |

| | | |system and Oracle database with Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000. The |

| | | |result is a new enterprise solution that is faster and more responsive for users and easier and less |

| | | |costly for the IT department to operate and manage. |

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Situation

Altera Corporation is a global leader in the design, manufacture, and marketing of programmable logic devices (PLDs)—semiconductors that can be fully customized by users—and associated development tools. These enable Altera customers to create and install custom chips for use in a broad range of electronic components and products such as air traffic systems, medical devices, telecommunications equipment, and consumer goods such as digital cameras and high-end television sets. The Silicon Valley company has about 14,000 customers and employs 2,000 people in 14 countries.

As a leading company in the highly competitive semiconductor industry, Altera understands the necessity of responding quickly and efficiently to market shifts—and equally important, to customer needs and demands. Since 1997, the company has relied to a great extent on enterprise software from Siebel Systems for running critical operations. Siebel business applications software helps Altera manage customer relationships, consolidate and coordinate sales leads, respond to service requests, and perform other important business activities that help the company maintain its position in the electronics market.

With the introduction of Siebel 7.7 applications, including Siebel Service, Siebel Sales, and Siebel Partner Relationship Management, Altera management recognized the opportunity for upgrading a critical enterprise solution, which in turn could help the company refine its customer relationship activities. Specifically, Altera wanted to take advantage of the new and enhanced features built into the latest Siebel business applications, including Web-based capabilities that could help Altera streamline the management of, and access to, information in its Siebel application.

The move to the new version of Siebel business applications was a significant change, and this led Altera’s IT department and upper management to reevaluate the company’s entire IT system. For example, the company also wanted to implement an effective technology platform that could take advantage of Siebel’s enhanced functionality with new Web-based capabilities that could improve internal collaborative and communication processes. Altera also saw an opportunity to reduce the amount of IT resources required to maintain the system and thus lower its total cost of ownership.

During the review process, Altera examined its use of the Oracle database software that had supported the previous Siebel application. Licensing for the Oracle software had become very expensive, and the UNIX-based systems running the Oracle databases were complex to administer and program.

Solution

Altera met with Microsoft representatives in California and learned more about the close cooperative relationship and technology alliance between Microsoft and Siebel. Microsoft also conducted a proof of concept that demonstrated the effectiveness of a combined Microsoft and Siebel solution. With this evidence, Altera decided to switch its platform for Siebel from UNIX to the Microsoft® Windows Server™ 2003 Enterprise Edition operating system and also installed Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 Enterprise Edition in place of Oracle to provide the database for the Siebel application data information. Both Windows Server and SQL Server are part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software.

The solution, which Altera deployed on Dell PowerEdge 6600 series server hardware and operates on 13 servers, went live in late 2004. About 1,000 users—both employees and partners—access the solution, and Altera is continuing with incremental rollouts of other Siebel applications to minimize disruptions to company operations.

Benefits

By deploying Windows Server and SQL Server in place of UNIX and Oracle to support Siebel 7.7 applications, Altera simplified the deployment and administration of a major upgrade to a mission-critical business system. Because system performance is much faster than before, the Siebel business applications respond to employees’ queries much more quickly, which in turn reduces user frustration and increases productivity. The new solution also provides great scalability, not only in how much demand can be put on the system, but also in laying the groundwork for new features that can help Altera operate more effectively.

Windows Server and SQL Server Are Easy to Deploy and Manage

Jason Amici, Senior Supervisor of the Customer Information Systems Group at Altera, says that when the company discussed replacing Oracle, the initial reaction was that any replacement effort would be too complex and potentially disruptive to a critical business system.

“We viewed a switch from Oracle to SQL Server as being a very large effort, and because of this, there was a lot of hesitation about even considering it,” says Amici. “But during our initial meetings with Microsoft and Siebel, we learned that the Microsoft-Siebel alliance was very strong and would minimize the impact of a technology migration on our company. We went through an initial two-hour planning process and a one-week proof of concept. In that short span of time, it went from being an unimaginable scenario to a manageable project where we could see how to bring on a brand-new system, migrate data, and bring the system online very quickly.”

With the combination of Windows Server and SQL Server replacing UNIX and Oracle, Altera has been able to simplify the administration of its Siebel business applications and achieve greater operational efficiency, says Bill Levesque, Program Director for Customer Information Systems.

“Now we’re managing just Windows®-based servers, instead of managing a heterogeneous environment of Windows and UNIX, so we have less administrative cost, and we need less expertise to handle different platforms,” Levesque says.

Lourdes Del Rosario, Lead Database Administrator for Altera’s Siebel business applications, echoes this statement, adding that “the administration of SQL Server is faster and more efficient than working with Oracle.

“Most of the manual tasks in Oracle, such as database cloning, extraction, integrity, optimization, memory/disk space management, and dynamic allocation of resources, can be automated in SQL Server. This saves us a lot of administrative time,” Del Rosario adds. “The SQL Server Enterprise Manager has more graphical components, wizards, and other features that make administration user friendly and intuitive. And, since the product integrates with other Microsoft products, a lot of Windows-based applications integrate with Enterprise Manager—for example, using Microsoft Exchange Server or Microsoft Office Outlook® for setting up alerts.”

Bill Kroger, Manager of the Customer Information Systems Group at Altera, concurs. “This new solution is just a lot easier to maintain,” Kroger says. “We developed an intuitive Windows-based graphical user interface on top of the database. When you’re using Oracle on UNIX, you’ve always got to deal with the command line and very basic tools that require you to bring in other external tools to get things done. I’m much more comfortable and productive using Microsoft tools.”

New System Provides Improved Performance

Currently, Altera’s technical services, marketing, and call center employees are using the new system, and in the future the company will roll it out to sales and operations. The company conducted tests to make sure that the new solution could handle the daily demands of Altera’s business.

“We did a scalability test using SQL Server and brought it up to more than 1,000 concurrent users,” Amici says. “The system did not even blink. We did simulated scenarios in which we executed several thousand transactions during the period of a day. With the new system, the slowest transaction was less than a second. We’ve had instances where the timing for a response to a particular kind of query went from 8 or 10 seconds down to a sub-second response. This system really screams.”

The performance improvements in the new Siebel business applications have been noticed across the company. Levesque says that when Altera made the decision to switch to Windows Server and SQL Server, he knew from experience not to make promises to users on how the new solution would perform. “Fortunately, we started getting spontaneous feedback from users regarding the improved performance of the Web-based tools,” he says. “That’s been huge for us. In fact, we had been using a server-based system with Citrix for some of our European staff, but we’ve been able to eliminate that because the performance improvement has been so drastic. Those staff members don’t have to worry about delays in getting information.”

Windows Server Technologies Can Support Future Enhancements

The performance improvements in the new system reassure Altera that the system can scale quite well to larger numbers of users—and to heavier use as new features are deployed. “One of the main reasons you install a new infrastructure like this is to enable your options somewhere in the future. One of the big benefits of going to the [Windows Server– and SQL Server–based] solution for Siebel is that we could integrate far more easily with a product like Microsoft [Office] SharePoint® Portal Server,” Levesque says.

SharePoint Portal Server enables enterprises to develop an intelligent portal that seamlessly connects users, teams, and knowledge so people can take advantage of relevant information across business processes to help them work more efficiently. By integrating its data through Siebel, SQL Server, and SharePoint Portal Server, Altera can, for example, create sales collaboration sites that can assist virtual sales teams in quickly pulling information from Siebel on important sales opportunities, and then working together to win the business.

“Because of the alliance of Microsoft and Siebel and the benefits that alliance delivers to us, we’re expecting to put together various collaborative solutions that were difficult or impossible to create before,” Levesque says. “It will give us the capability to implement more solutions in more locations to address complex customer issues.

“I think the success that we’ve experienced with the upgrade and the conversion to an underlying Microsoft infrastructure and other Microsoft technologies,” Levesque adds, “really speaks to the quality of service and the quality of product that Microsoft and Siebel have provided.”

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System integrated server infrastructure software is designed to support end-to-end solutions built on the Windows Server operating system. Windows Server System creates an infrastructure based on integrated innovation, Microsoft’s holistic approach to building products and solutions that are intrinsically designed to work together and interact seamlessly with other data and applications across your IT environment. This helps you reduce the costs of ongoing operations, deliver a more secure and reliable IT infrastructure, and drive valuable new capabilities for the future growth of your business.

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

windowsserversystem

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Windows Server System

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition |Hardware

■ Dell PowerEdge 6600 servers | |

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Microsoft, Outlook, SharePoint, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published April 2005 | | |

For More Information

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For more information about Altera products and services, call (408) 544-7000 or visit the Web site at:



“We’ve had instances where the timing for a response to a particular kind of query went from 8 or 10 seconds down to a sub-second response. This system really screams.”

Jason Amici, Senior Supervisor, Customer Information Systems, Altera

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