How a Global Manufacturer Achieved $8M+ in Value Through Oracle Cloud, Powered by Sutherland

Industry: Manufacturing
Services: Cloud, Digital Engineering Services, Enterprise Packaged Applications

Client Overview

A Fortune 500 global manufacturer of automotive components manages complex supply chain, finance, and HR operations. With worldwide operations and diverse enterprise workloads, the company required scalable cloud infrastructure, disciplined cost governance, and validated business continuity to enable future growth.

The Challenge

The manufacturer faced multiple challenges across its IT landscape. Legacy data centers were costly, insecure, and nearing the end of their life cycle, while outdated enterprise applications created compliance risks and limited agility. At the same time, the expansion of Oracle Cloud workloads introduced unexpected billing anomalies and insufficient visibility into cloud costs. Disaster recovery capabilities were also underdeveloped, with prior tests failing to validate full-stack resilience. Collectively, these issues exposed the organization to financial, operational, and reputational risks while limiting its ability to embrace future digital initiatives.

Sutherland Solution

Sutherland partnered with the client on a multi-year transformation initiative aimed at addressing infrastructure, financial governance, and operational resilience. The journey began with a zero-cost Oracle Cloud migration, where outdated enterprise applications were rehosted onOracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), resulting in $8M+ annual hosting savings and thereby strengthening enterprise security. Sutherland negotiated a multi-million-dollar waiver of reinstatement penalty. The client was reinstated to Oracle support at a lower total cost. A secure, fully supported Oracle EBS environment was rehosted onto OCI Linux, powered by Oracle’s Cloud Infrastructure and layered with enterprise-grade security (Carbon Black, CyberArk, Proofpoint, etc.), and also, got access to back-dated patches for infrastructure and application to secure the Oracle EBS application. The net cost of Oracle Application Support over the contract duration is significantly lower compared to Rimini Street application support.

To optimize financial stewardship, Sutherland implemented FinOps governance. Role-based IAM policies, budget alerts, storage cleanup, and billing anomaly detection helped recover almost $100k in discrepancies while establishing proactive controls to prevent future overspending. To ensure resilience, Sutherland deployed bubble-mode disaster recovery drills using OCI and DoubleTake replication.

These isolated, full-stack simulations validated recovery time and point objectives without impacting production systems. By addressing these areas holistically, Sutherland delivered a future-ready, cloud-based ecosystem built for efficiency, financial discipline, and resilience.

The Outcome

The transformation yielded significant business and technology outcomes. Migrating to OCI reduced infrastructure costs by $8M+ annually and eliminated compliance risks, while FinOps maturity brought transparency and predictability to cloud spending. Disaster recovery drills validated the company’s ability to withstand disruptions without compromising business operations or customer trust. Sutherland’s bubble-mode DR solution empowered the organization with predictable, annual disaster recovery validation. Realistic failovers were executed without production downtime, delivering confidence that reduced RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective) thresholds.

With rigorous expense tracking and system remediation, Sutherland helped the client recover almost $100k in billing discrepancies and optimize storage costs. The budget alert model prevented future overspending, while infrastructure upgrades improved stability and resource utilization. A strong FinOps framework now supports OCI governance, ensuring proactive control and optimized spending. Oracle Cloud infrastructure and managed services replaced IBM, offsetting the cloud transformation investment and enabling the adoption of OCI security within budget.

Collectively, these initiatives established a secure, scalable, and efficient foundation that supports future digital growth and prepares the enterprise for Industry 4.0 advancements.