Loblaw rings up Oracle Cloud Infrastructure

Loblaw Companies Limited, Canada’s leading food and pharmacy retailer, has migrated its SAP systems to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), modernizing its IT infrastructure to efficiently scale operations. Loblaw now runs one of the world’s largest single-instance SAP databases—more than 180TB—to manage nearly every piece of its business from retail price tags to financials. By moving its on-premises database footprint to OCI, Loblaw has seen an up to 35 percent improvement in performance.

With approximately two billion transactions each year in its unmatched network of 2,500 stores and national e-commerce options, Loblaw brings food, pharmacy, beauty, apparel, and financial services to customers through many of Canada’s favorite and most-trusted brands. The company’s loyalty program, PC Optimum™, has nearly 16 million active members and is one of Canada’s largest and most loved reward programs. As Loblaw has grown and diversified its operations, it required an IT infrastructure that could efficiently scale. Earlier this year, Loblaw migrated its SAP database to Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI.

“It was extremely important for us to minimize risk during the move to the cloud. The SAP database had to operate correctly after the migration to safeguard the success of our businesses,” said David Markwell, chief technology and analytics officer, Loblaw. “OCI had the proven experience of running databases at this scale in the cloud which made them the right choice for this work. The real validation came when our post-migration tests showed a 35 percent increase in performance in key SAP transactions. The results speak for themselves.”

“Helping Loblaw move a database of that size and importance to the cloud was more than a standard cloud ‘lift and shift’ operation—it was a ‘lift and shine.’ Working closely with our partners at Accenture, we were able to provide a world-class infrastructure to serve as a foundation for Loblaw’s operations now and into the future,” said Karan Batta, senior vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. “OCI brings a unique ability to scale to run the biggest workloads our customers can throw at us. Our platform enables us to run massive workloads, including single-instance databases that are hundreds of terabytes in size.”

Oracle Customer Success Services (CSS), which includes a team of SAP-certified engineers, played a key role in setting up the database and facilitating a successful migration to OCI in compliance with SAP’s support requirements. Oracle CSS will provide continuing support services to help maintain the database’s operating environment. In collaboration with Accenture, Loblaw was able to update its applications and optimize them to run in the cloud to help ensure the success of its IT operations for years to come.