Moving from Oracle on-premises to AWS Cloud saved Macquarie University $1M+ annually
Challenge
About Macquarie University
Located in Sydney, Australia, Macquarie University is recognised as one of the country’s leading higher education institutions. The university has over 40,000 students studying undergraduate and graduate programs in the arts, business, humanities, science, engineering, technology, and medicine disciplines across four major faculties, including Macquarie University Hospital, a private teaching hospital.
Tim Hume, Chief Information and Digital Officer (CIDO), Macquarie University, is responsible for leading and overseeing the university’s information and digital technology initiatives. This includes managing the implementation of technology systems and services, and ensuring that technology fully supports the university’s students and faculty members to enhance teaching, learning, research, and administrative processes.
The Macquarie University Challenge
Managing and maintaining legacy IT systems is challenging, resource-draining and costly. For a number of years Macquarie University was locked into Oracle hardware licensing and Oracle enterprise-wide licensing, which is calculated on student numbers. This hindered the ability to scale and respond to the changing needs of the university.
When the costs of its on-premise IT infrastructure started escalating dramatically – exceeding $1M annually – and with the university not fully utilising their Oracle licences, the university decided to terminate support, unbundle from Oracle on-premise hardware licences and migrate to AWS Cloud.
About Macquarie University
Located in Sydney, Australia, Macquarie University is recognised as one of the country’s leading higher education institutions. The university has over 40,000 students studying undergraduate and graduate programs in the arts, business, humanities, science, engineering, technology, and medicine disciplines across four major faculties, including Macquarie University Hospital, a private teaching hospital.
Tim Hume, Chief Information and Digital Officer (CIDO), Macquarie University, is responsible for leading and overseeing the university’s information and digital technology initiatives. This includes managing the implementation of technology systems and services, and ensuring that technology fully supports the university’s students and faculty members to enhance teaching, learning, research, and administrative processes.
The Macquarie University Challenge
Managing and maintaining legacy IT systems is challenging, resource-draining and costly. For a number of years Macquarie University was locked into Oracle hardware licensing and Oracle enterprise-wide licensing, which is calculated on student numbers. This hindered the ability to scale and respond to the changing needs of the university.
When the costs of its on-premise IT infrastructure started escalating dramatically – exceeding $1M annually – and with the university not fully utilising their Oracle licences, the university decided to terminate support, unbundle from Oracle on-premise hardware licences and migrate to AWS Cloud.
Solution
Macquarie University engaged Higher Ed Services (HES), a not-for-profit supporting Australia’s higher education sector, to reduce its substantial Oracle licensing costs—exceeding $1 million annually for Enterprise Edition.
In partnership with NEXTGEN Optima and Blue Crystal Solutions, HES assessed the university’s Oracle workloads, which were running on Oracle Enterprise Edition—only available in AWS under a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model. This meant costly licenses would still apply even after migrating from on-premise infrastructure to AWS.
A detailed review of Macquarie’s database environment revealed that its workloads could successfully operate on Oracle Standard Edition 2, which is available as a license-included service on AWS. This insight enabled the university to eliminate the need for Enterprise Edition and cancel its associated licensing contracts—achieving significant cost savings.
To ensure a seamless migration, HES brought together the expertise of NEXTGEN Optima and Blue Crystal Solutions, a trusted IT consultancy specialising in cloud, application, and database services. The migration strategy was designed to avoid disruption across the university’s campuses, faculty, and hospital.
The phased approach included:
- Pilot Migration: Verifying performance on a test workload.
- Non-Production Migration: Transitioning non-critical systems.
- Production Migration: Migrating essential workloads.
- Hypercare & Knowledge Transfer: Ensuring system stability and supporting internal teams post-migration.
By combining collaborative expertise and a clear cloud strategy, Macquarie University successfully moved to a more cost-effective and sustainable Oracle environment.
Macquarie University engaged Higher Ed Services (HES), a not-for-profit supporting Australia’s higher education sector, to reduce its substantial Oracle licensing costs—exceeding $1 million annually for Enterprise Edition.
In partnership with NEXTGEN Optima and Blue Crystal Solutions, HES assessed the university’s Oracle workloads, which were running on Oracle Enterprise Edition—only available in AWS under a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model. This meant costly licenses would still apply even after migrating from on-premise infrastructure to AWS.
A detailed review of Macquarie’s database environment revealed that its workloads could successfully operate on Oracle Standard Edition 2, which is available as a license-included service on AWS. This insight enabled the university to eliminate the need for Enterprise Edition and cancel its associated licensing contracts—achieving significant cost savings.
To ensure a seamless migration, HES brought together the expertise of NEXTGEN Optima and Blue Crystal Solutions, a trusted IT consultancy specialising in cloud, application, and database services. The migration strategy was designed to avoid disruption across the university’s campuses, faculty, and hospital.
The phased approach included:
- Pilot Migration: Verifying performance on a test workload.
- Non-Production Migration: Transitioning non-critical systems.
- Production Migration: Migrating essential workloads.
- Hypercare & Knowledge Transfer: Ensuring system stability and supporting internal teams post-migration.
By combining collaborative expertise and a clear cloud strategy, Macquarie University successfully moved to a more cost-effective and sustainable Oracle environment.
Results
Now the migration is complete, the project team continues to provide support, ensuring the university’s IT systems are operating smoothly and efficiently by continuing to monitor performance, addressing any issues that arise, and making recommendations for further optimisation.
Replacing the ageing on-premise hardware with AWS Cloud has delivered better performance for students and staff using the systems.
In the on-premise environment, licensing costs are based on the number of cores you have rather than the number you use. You may have four cores but only use one – or even a percentage of a single core – but still pay for all four cores. There is no flexibility.
Right sizing in AWS cloud matches the instance types to your workload performance and CPU capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost. This allows you to identify opportunities to eliminate or downsize without compromising capacity or other requirements, which results in lower costs.
"Terminating Oracle licences led to three years of maintenance cost savings of $1M+ per year for the university." Tim Hume, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Macquarie University
To help Macquarie University with its right-sizing, the project team assessed the instances the university needed, the spikes of every database workload that was running on-premise then right-sized it to the right environment to lower cloud costs. This allowed Tim and his team to run the exact same on-premise workloads in AWS for a lot less.
For Tim and his team, increasing or decreasing capacity at different times of the year is simple and much faster with AWS than on-premise systems.
The savings for the university moving from Oracle on-premise to AWS Cloud are considerable. The forecast run rate on AWS is $450,000/year. This significant saving allows the university to fund new initiatives, deliver greater student services and expand its facilities.
Additionally, the time from commencing AWS Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA) engagement to cloud migration was just six months.
Since completing the cloud migration, Macquarie University has been looking for further assistance with cloud financial management (FinOps). This assesses how the infrastructure has been deployed in the cloud and then optimises it to save even more costs.
Now the migration is complete, the project team continues to provide support, ensuring the university’s IT systems are operating smoothly and efficiently by continuing to monitor performance, addressing any issues that arise, and making recommendations for further optimisation.
Replacing the ageing on-premise hardware with AWS Cloud has delivered better performance for students and staff using the systems.
In the on-premise environment, licensing costs are based on the number of cores you have rather than the number you use. You may have four cores but only use one – or even a percentage of a single core – but still pay for all four cores. There is no flexibility.
Right sizing in AWS cloud matches the instance types to your workload performance and CPU capacity requirements at the lowest possible cost. This allows you to identify opportunities to eliminate or downsize without compromising capacity or other requirements, which results in lower costs.
"Terminating Oracle licences led to three years of maintenance cost savings of $1M+ per year for the university." Tim Hume, Chief Information and Digital Officer, Macquarie University
To help Macquarie University with its right-sizing, the project team assessed the instances the university needed, the spikes of every database workload that was running on-premise then right-sized it to the right environment to lower cloud costs. This allowed Tim and his team to run the exact same on-premise workloads in AWS for a lot less.
For Tim and his team, increasing or decreasing capacity at different times of the year is simple and much faster with AWS than on-premise systems.
The savings for the university moving from Oracle on-premise to AWS Cloud are considerable. The forecast run rate on AWS is $450,000/year. This significant saving allows the university to fund new initiatives, deliver greater student services and expand its facilities.
Additionally, the time from commencing AWS Optimisation and Licensing Assessment (OLA) engagement to cloud migration was just six months.
Since completing the cloud migration, Macquarie University has been looking for further assistance with cloud financial management (FinOps). This assesses how the infrastructure has been deployed in the cloud and then optimises it to save even more costs.