News Corp migrates Oracle to AWS Australia

Myriad IT has undertaken a pioneering Amazon Web Services project by migrating News Corp Australia's finance ERP system into the cloud.

CRN understands that the News Corp Australia project is only the second example anywhere in the world of a client moving the popular JD Edwards system to AWS.

The landmark project, led by Myriad IT national accounts manager Andrew Bloxsom – himself a former News Corp staffer – is the first such case in the Asia-Pacific.

News Corp has instigated a worldwide "cloud first" directive, but the media giant's Australian chief information officer, Tom Quinn, told CRN that performance was his number one priority.

"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," said Quinn.

"We had some problems early that was 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-premises]."

News Corp Australia has 350 users on its JD Edwards finance system spread nationally, with the upgrade going live in April, said Bloxsom. "We had to do performance tests for Brisbane, two sites in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth and the sub-continent."

Myriad's Andrew Bloxsom with News Corp Australia CIO Tom Quinn, sampling the publisher's offerings

Bloxsom told CRN that the News Corp project involved a double challenge – a software upgrade to JD Edwards' latest supported release, as well as the infrastructure migration to AWS.

"[We were] taking them up to the latest release, updating training documentation, and then giving News Corp the opportunity to look at additional functionality down the track, along with the move to Amazon."

At its peak, Myriad IT had 11 staff bunkered down for the News Corp project.

Bloxsom said that Oracle was happy with Myriad's work in putting its software on AWS.

"They've got their own cloud, but they know at this stage they're not going to be able to compete against Amazon," said Bloxsom. "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, Windows virtual machines."

News Corp's Quinn said he had no reservations about security on public cloud, because it is in the interests of vendors to keep data safe from harm.

"The bloke who runs enterprise for Google, 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."

Myriad IT has previously been in the headlines for work at Monash University and Tennis Australia. The Melbourne-headquartered Microsoft and Oracle partner ranked No.31 in last year's CRN Fast50, reporting $6.5 million in revenue.