Intelsat cuts connectivity costs by 50% with Oracle Integration

Intelsat’s history is marked by many memorable milestones, including the television transmission of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission in 1969. Today, the company operates the largest integrated space and terrestrial network in the world, delivering communications access across its extended space network, the internet, and mobile wireless systems anywhere and at any time.

In 2018, Intelsat began to build a software-defined, multi-orbit, multilayer 5G network that would require unified, event-based connectivity across all relevant applications, data, and partner ecosystems. As part of the global initiative, the company modernized applications across nearly all the company’s business support systems, including migrating from Oracle E-Business Suite to Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM). Additionally, the firm modernized dozens of cloud, custom, and on-premises applications to automate end-to-end processes across customer relationship management (CRM), procurement, facilities management, and billing.

However, updating Intelsat’s business support systems amplified the challenge of managing its complex web of integrations. Initially, custom point-to-point interfaces were built for each project, but this placed an undue burden on IT staff. The company spent too much time and money building and maintaining connectivity, consolidating information via spreadsheets, and carrying out manual processes. Plus, the team needed to be proficient in half a dozen programming languages.

With the goal of deploying seamless, event-driven connectivity across its business support systems, Intelsat evaluated offerings from Mulesoft, Dell Boomi, Azure SSRS, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). IT staff determined that OCI would most comprehensively cover all use cases, spanning 160 databases, the company’s partner ecosystem, and over 100 on-premises, cloud, and web application scenarios. Intelsat’s IT staffers were also impressed by how quickly they could tap Oracle Integration’s prebuilt adapters to deliver robust connectivity and automation solutions. OCI offered not just a comprehensive integration platform, but also resources that would accelerate the company’s digital transformation.

Intelsat used the supported SOAP, REST, and database adapters in Oracle Integration to deploy over 75 integrations within its business support systems, seamlessly connecting applications and related data across cloud, on-premises, and web applications.

Additionally, it uses over 40 standard Oracle Cloud ERP and Cloud HCM integrations. IT employees enjoy the convenience of unified connectivity monitoring to reduce operational costs, and built-in API management for governance and security. APIs can easily be exposed for use by both internal and external developers. New integrations and process automation releases go to production four to six times faster than before. Integrations made with the supported adapters are release tolerant, with no modification needed when quarterly SaaS updates are performed. OCI easily scales to meet Intelsat’s fluctuation in demand, and because the company pays only for the resources it uses, it saw a 50% cost savings.

Intelsat’s application developers embraced additional Oracle Integration features including Visual Builder for low-code application development, and Process Automation to accelerate time to value for SaaS extensions and data-driven workflows. Before adopting Oracle Integration, consolidating financial data across 26 legal entities was done manually. Now, consolidating financial results is accomplished with a click of a button.