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