Finding the Bleeding Edge without HemorrhagingInnovation with Minimal Risk

Company Background▪ PulteGroup has been providing homeownership to families for 60 years. What

started as a single home built and sold by the entrepreneurial spirit of an 18-year-old Bill Pulte, has grown into the industry’s sole multi-brand homebuilding company with the ability to serve customers in all phases of life.

▪ Today, PulteGroup operates in approximately 50 markets throughout the country.

▪ In 2013, PulteGroup closed 17,766 homes earning 5.4 billion dollars in revenue

Problem Statement▪ The company had not kept up with IT system maintenance since 2008,

which prevented the introduction of new technology and compromised the ability to support production systems. ▪ The core financial system and core business functions were running Lawson 8.1

and Oracle 11gR1

▪ Improvements to business functions were limited, at best

▪ Stability was in decline

▪ Performance was major issue

▪ Business continuity plans were manually executed and involved skilled engineers

▪ Cost of extended support was continuously rising

The Goal▪ To create a stable, supportable, and sustainable platform for

future initiatives to be built upon.▪ Maintain a cost-effective computing environment while delivering

improved performance, allowing business processes to be more efficient

▪ Establish a computing environment upon which can be built upon and scaled in the future

▪ Minimize the cost and disruption to the business while achieving the above

The Approach▪ The company had not kept up with IT system maintenance since 2008, which

prevented the introduction of new technology and compromised the ability to support production systems.

▪ The core financial system and core business functions were running Lawson 8.1 and Oracle 11gR1

▪ Improvements to business functions were limited, at best

▪ Stability was in decline

▪ Performance was major issue

▪ Business continuity plans were manually executed and involved skilled engineers

▪ Cost of extended support was continuously rising

The Solution▪ Arizona

▪ Exadata X3 (1/4 rack)

▪ Oracle 12c w/Multitenant

▪ Partitioning

▪ Active Data Guard

▪ Golden Gate

▪ Non-RAC

▪ Colorado

▪ Exadata X3 (1/8 rack)

▪ Oracle 12c w/Multitenant

▪ Partitioning

▪ Active Data Guard

▪ Golden Gate

▪ Non-RAC

Why Multitenant?▪ Added capabilities:

▪ The ability to consolidate pluggable databases into a container databases

▪ The ability to patch/upgrade “many as one”

▪ The ability to quickly clone PDBs for multi-purpose use

▪ The potential capital cost savings

▪ Consolidating non-production databases could save on capital costs for both licensing and hardware

▪ The potential operational cost savings

▪ The company was short on DBA resources

The Cost Analysis▪ IBM p770 to Exadata X3

▪ The avoidance of cost for purchasing additional hardware for p770

▪ Purchase of additional Oracle licensing to cover the performance gaps

▪ Purchase of additional Oracle licensing to cover the planned upgrade environment for Infor Lawson

▪ The avoidance of cost for purchasing additional storage capacity on EMC VMAX

$1.7 MILLION IN CAPITAL SAVINGS

The Results▪ Capital expense savings exactly as planned

▪ Operational expense savings of approximately 4 months of DBA time

▪ On time delivery into production

▪ Nearly 2X performance gains

▪ Exadata platform has brought stability to the environment, curing performance issues

▪ Patching “many-as-one” brought ease to meeting the supportability goal

▪ The unexpected unused capacity has given opportunities to bring in additional workloads without capital expenditures