State of Oklahoma Moves 160-Plus Agencies to Oracle Cloud in Under 12 Months
The State of Oklahoma serves more than four million residents through 160-plus government agencies, universities, colleges, and affiliates. Coordinating IT modernization across an operation that size is a significant undertaking, and one that had been long overdue.
Industry
Public Sector
Service
Consulting
Solution
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure / PeopleSoft
Oklahoma’s agencies had been running on 20-year-old software and aging mainframe infrastructure. When a widespread outage hit the Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s server network in 2019, it made the urgency of modernization impossible to ignore.
The Challenge
The Oklahoma Corporation Commission was running an early-generation PeopleSoft application alongside aging mainframe infrastructure that handled all of the state’s forms and reports. The system couldn’t keep up. When the 2019 outage hit, it impacted operations across the entire state.
“We couldn’t let this happen again,” said Ayana Wilkins, Director of Financial Enterprise Applications at the state’s Office of Management and Enterprise Services (OMES), the agency leading IT modernization across Oklahoma’s government.
Oklahoma Human Services faced a similar situation, running financial operations on an aging mid-range server and needing to modernize its travel and expense systems to meet statewide requirements.
The Solution
OMES started with a proof of concept to validate that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure could work for the Oklahoma Corporation Commission and other agencies. When the results confirmed it could, they brought in Mythics to lead the cloud migration and application modernization effort.
Working with Mythics, OMES migrated existing on-premises PeopleSoft applications to Oracle Cloud and upgraded state agencies to the latest PeopleSoft Update Manager and PeopleTools.
For Oklahoma Human Services, Mythics used Oracle APEX to build a new travel and expense application in Oracle Cloud, later named I Travel OK. The app is now on track to become the standard T&E solution across all state agencies.
Throughout the project, Mythics provided the technical and management expertise OMES needed to coordinate tightly across agencies, business leadership, and the broader project team.
“Mythics really helped move the state to the next level,” Wilkins said.
Services provided:
- PeopleSoft Cloud Migration and Upgrade
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Implementation
- PeopleSoft Update Manager and PeopleTools Upgrades
- Oracle APEX Application Development (I Travel OK)
- Ongoing Application Enhancement and Support
The Results
More than 4,000 state employees across Oklahoma’s agencies benefited from the PeopleSoft migration and upgrade to Oracle Cloud, completed in under 12 months.
- Cost savings and operational efficiency through lower fees, flexible compute usage, and cost-effective internet bandwidth
- Smarter risk management, eliminating exposure to on-premises outages and natural disasters
- Better security with a unified view of cloud security posture across state agencies
- Higher productivity across the Oklahoma Corporation Commission and other agencies
- Faster application performance through OCI’s high-speed network connectivity
- Better user experience with virtually no outages or system delays after migration
- Comprehensive automation, including automated backups, autotuning, automatic patching, and compute autoscaling
“When we embarked on our OCI journey, we made sure we had the correct pipeline for traffic from the data center to OCI. We haven’t seen any latency to date. It’s worked extremely well,” Wilkins said.
“With a complex government entity such as the State of Oklahoma, with many intricacies, I appreciate our partnership with Mythics, as we continue to enhance our relationship,” she added.
