Behind News Corp's headline-grabbing shift to AWS

When Australia’s biggest newspaper company, which publishes major metropolitan newspapers Herald Sun, Courier Mail and the Daily Telegraph, needed to upgrade its ageing finance ERP, it decided to look to the cloud. CRN ’s Tony Yoo sat down with News Corp Australian chief information officer Tom Quinn and Myriad IT national accounts manager Andrew Bloxsom to investigate the move to put Oracle JD Edwards on Amazon
Web Services.

What is News Corp’s strategy around cloud?

Tom Quinn  We’ve had a cloud-first strategy for some time – nearly two years. That means that any new systems we buy or any major upgrades we do, we ask the question, “Why not the cloud?” 

We do that for a couple of reasons. Cost is not the main reason. Cost is generally cheaper but not always. We do it for speed and agility – the ability to deploy fast, to be able to change products, to be able to pivot and go in another direction and to save ourselves the pain of major software upgrades every two years at capital expenditure and the cost of stopping the business moving forwards.

This piece of work doesn’t exactly do that, but it does fit with our cloud-first strategy and we needed a major upgrade [of the JD Edwards finance system]. We were three versions behind and couldn’t continue that way. Our new-ish CFO has been here 18 months or so and she’s into a lot of stuff that we couldn’t do. We weren’t going to be able to support [her work].  So while we’re doing a major upgrade, we thought: “Okay. Cloud first. Let’s see if we can stick it in Amazon.” Which we did, with the help of [Myriad IT]. They did a fantastic job. 

Is the cloud-first strategy global?

Quinn It’s a global push, yes. We have targets to meet [on] percentage of computing in the cloud. We’re in the 30s [30 percent] now. It wouldn’t hurt to be in the 70s by the end of the calendar year. So we’ve got some time, but we need to get on with it. 

Myriad IT already had a relationship with News Corp, right?

Andrew Bloxsom  We’ve been supporting the JD Edwards instance for News Corp Australia since 2006. I was a News employee once, then Myriad brought me on board. We’ve been involved in every upgrade and the National Finance Project in a technical capacity since then. 

We also provide backfill day-to-day support when we’re called. News Corp Australia has gone from four [different finance] instances to one. Then taking it from on-premise to cloud over the last eight years. 

When News Corp decided that they wanted to go to the cloud for JD Edwards, did they come to Myriad IT first or was there a competitive process?

Bloxsom No, they came to us directly, which is part of the ongoing partnership that we have. 

Quinn These guys know our systems, know our finance. They’re as  good as employees. 

Can you tell us about the technical achievements of the project?

Bloxsom The key scope items was moving to cloud, moving to Amazon, [going] to the latest supported release, but doing it all from a functionally ‘as-is’. It was about not making any changes and not changing anything on the business side. 

The other key scope items were keeping it as simple as possible but taking them up to the latest release, updating training documentation, and giving News Corp the opportunity to look at additional functionality down the track, along with the move to Amazon. 

From the business perspective and the IT side, we’ve hit the mark on those. 

[We had] very good project management and controls put in place to allow us just to stay with the scope items. A key infrastructure item is Oracle’s inline memory that has been utilised here by News Corp, which will allow us to stay or actually improve performance with the move to Amazon.

What’s the user population like for News Corp Australia’s JD Edwards finance system? 

Bloxsom Three hundred and fifty. We had to do performance tests for Brisbane, two sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth as well as the sub-continent.

Tom, what were News Corp’s major objectives for this project? Was performance a priority?

Quinn Absolutely – at least the same performance. I didn’t want our finance people to see a visible degradation in their response times or to affect their work in any way.  

We [ended up] quicker. We’ve taken a whole lot of superfluous code out, all the superfluous processes, and cleared things up dramatically. 

Next: Matching on-premise

So performance was a priority, but, speaking honestly, what were your realistic expectations moving to the public cloud? Were you really expecting it to match on-premise?

Quinn Absolutely. I’m not going to put News’ business or my reputation at risk with a cloud-first strategy if it gives worse performance. So it had to perform. 

We had some problems early on that were tuning related, but that’s what happens when you move to the cloud and you go from being able to vertically drive performance to horizontal scaling. But [ultimately] I was absolutely expecting at least the same performance [as on-premise].

The system has been live for two months now – how’s the general feedback been?

Bloxsom No yelling and screaming is my take – and I’ve been in continual contact. The only difference is that the navigating around the application is slightly different. 

Quinn That’s more to do with the software upgrade than the cloud.

Bloxsom Yes. Those are teething issues for people learning the new way to get around to their apps Outside of that, all good.

Have the ongoing costs been to your expectations?

Quinn I haven’t done a tally up, but when we went into it, the business case gave us a benefit, so I’d expect [that to be the case].

This is one of the first instances globally of JD Edwards running on AWS, is that right?

Bloxsom It was stated that this was a first in the region.

So the first JD Edwards in production on AWS in the Asia-Pacific region?

Bloxsom Yes, but it’s been a common thing for people to push their disaster recovery [onto AWS].

How does Oracle feel about what Myriad IT is doing with News Corp?

Bloxsom They’re fantastic. They’re all for what’s happening. We want to look at [this as a] case study. They want to look at getting News Corp along with Myriad IT to present this to the user community and say, “This is what happened. It works.”

They’ve got their own cloud, but they know at this stage they’re not going to be able to compete against Amazon. That’s always how JD Edwards has been – you can put it on any type of infrastructure that you like – whether it’s a P Series, RS boxes, or Windows virtual machines.

So Oracle’s happy, News Corp’s happy and Myriad IT is happy?

Quinn We’re ecstatic, although slightly concerned at the start.

Bloxsom There were things we took for granted. Having something in your own data set and just all the firewall rules that you had to put in place to deal with it. We had a very good architecture team here that we were able to work with. Once we got through that, apart from one performance hiccup that we fixed, there was no difference to having it hosted on-premise to being in the cloud. It didn’t make any difference to us.

Sounds like that was the major challenge: the firewall and the networking?

Bloxsom It was the service. You couldn’t talk to each other. You just had to put in a set of rules to say that I needed to connect between these two. I needed this PC to connect to this server to then deliver these files and things like that. Everything that we had in place and took for granted was being all set here in the News data centre.

Tom, have you had any interest from other News Corp entities around the world about what Australia has been doing?

Quinn Oh certainly. Nobody else runs JDE [on cloud]. They are all quite stunned that we could take what is quite an old Oracle app and stand it up on Amazon.

Before the News Corp project, was Myriad IT using Amazon on a regular basis or was this a one-off?

Quinn For production, yes [it was the first]. We’d done a few trials and bits and pieces but this is our first time for a production instance.

Do you feel like you’ve gained the confidence to do this with other clients if the situation arises?

Bloxsom Oh, yes, definitely. We do hosting ourselves and we learn a lot off that but then [it’s another step] dealing with someone the size of News Corp.

Quinn There could be smaller firms who don’t want to have to stand [a finance system] up themselves. Then you could offer to stick it in the cloud.

Bloxsom That’s what we’re doing. The first one was a little fast-moving consumer goods company at Mascot. Ten users. Took us three months to go to work. I’d say probably we’ve got a client base across 10, 12 countries now. Probably 80 customers. Eighty-five percent have been discussing [the cloud] as an option. Two years ago? Less than 50 would consider it. 

Do you care about sovereignty or is it more the performance you get out of the centres located locally?

Quinn Data sovereignty is not a risk to us. But we do hold stories, scoops, government investigations, and criminal investigations – some pretty sensitive stuff. 

The bloke who runs enterprise for Google [for example], he’s got 400 security engineers. I’ve got six. Who do you reckon will have a more secure technology stack? Him or me? Absolutely him, so [AWS is] an improved level of security [for News Corp]. If a public cloud provider gets hacked and cracked, their business is over. It’s absolutely in his interests to be better at it than I am.

So performance [is what we care about from local data centres].

BRIEF

The customer: News Corp Australia

• Established 1923 as News Limited
• Industry Publishing, news
• Brands The Australian, The Daily Telegraph, Herald Sun, The Courier Mail, The Advertiser, Hobart Mercury, NT News, Fox Sports

The supplier: Myriad IT

• Established 1999
• Headcount 56
• Chief executive Marcus Simkin
• Locations Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide
• Specialties Oracle (gold partner), Microsoft Dynamics (gold partner), managed services, testing, support, Dell (preferred partner)

The project

• Situation Finance ERP upgrade, infrastructure migration
• Technology Deployed JD Edwards on AWS
• Value Not disclosed
• Outcome Finance system running on public cloud with performance equal to or better than previous on-prem infrastructure