Australian Hearing replaces Wintel system with Oracle platform

Australian Hearing, an Australian Government agency and one of the world’s largest hearing services providers, has replaced its existing Wintel infrastructure with a new platform. The organisation also replaced its siloed, bespoke software collection with a suite of business software.

Australian Hearing provides hearing services to children, teenagers and young adults, up to the age of 26. The organisation’s IT department supports more than a thousand staff, including a mobile workforce of clinicians, as well as a national network of hearing centres and its research division, National Acoustic Laboratories.

The agency’s previous IT system experienced an average of two system outages per week. In addition, Australian Hearing wanted more agile business processes and to give clients greater accessibility through the organisation’s website.

Oracle Exadata was selected to provide a platform for Australian Hearing’s IT infrastructure. It replaced an existing Wintel platform and the organisation saw an immediate reduction in outages post-implementation.

Australian Hearing previously had a bespoke collection of software, created in 2000, that consisted of various silo applications. The organisation purchased the Exadata in May 2011 and completed the implementation, with the machine running its previous bespoke collection of software, in September 2011.

Then, in December 2011, the organisation replaced the bespoke system, implementing the Oracle E-Business Suite on the Exadata.

Fusion Middleware 11g solutions helped minimise the complexity of the application’s integration by allowing the IT department to build, deploy and manage the new system and to manage the end-to-end life cycle of user identities.

Peter Gasparovic, CIO, Australian Hearing, said: “In our 2010 Information Technology Strategic Plan, we set out our key strategic objectives, including ensuring our IT platform supports the business and that performance is improved; optimising our IT architecture; providing an interactive client and staff experience; and automating processes.

“Exadata, combined with Oracle Applications, middleware and database technologies, meets all our goals,” Gasparovic said.