Discovery Call — Banco Pacífico (fake name) — 2024-11-14

Attendees: Maria (SA), Jorge (CTO), Ana (DBA lead), Mike (infra mgr) 45 min call, mostly Jorge talking

Current State (what I could gather)

3x Oracle 19c databases on Exadata X8M on-prem
- largest one is ~4TB, OLTP workload (core banking txns)
- second is ~1.2TB — reporting/analytics, runs batch overnight
- third is smaller, ~300GB, "auxiliary services" — Jorge was vague here ??
GoldenGate replication between prod and DR site (San Jose DC)
Ana mentioned 99.95% availability SLA — "contractual, can't go lower"
PCI DSS compliance — mandatory, they process card transactions
~~2 RAC nodes~~ correction: 3 RAC nodes on the big DB, 2 on the others

current Oracle licensing spend ~$2M/year (Jorge said "around two million, maybe a bit more")
they have 8 processor licenses — BYOL eligible?? need to confirm with Oracle LMS
Mike mentioned support renewal coming up in Q2 — leverage point
also paying for GoldenGate licenses separately, didn't get the number

WebLogic 14c — 6 bare metal servers (BM)
- running core banking APIs + some internal portals
- ~~Java 8~~ Java 11 actually, Ana corrected
MQ Series for async messaging between services
- how tightly coupled?? need to dig into this
some .NET stuff too but "not critical" per Mike

seasonal peaks — Black Friday is 3x normal traffic
- "el último Black Friday casi nos tumba" — Jorge
- need autoscaling story for this
end of month batch processing also heavy
latency requirements: <50ms for API responses (p99)

2 Oracle DBAs — Ana + one other person
- NO cloud experience, "nunca hemos tocado la nube"
- will need training / enablement plan
- Ana seemed nervous about ADB automation — "qué pasa si algo sale mal?"
6 app developers, mostly Java
1 infra person (Mike) who does "everything else"

el CTO quiere migrar en 6 meses ("Jorge: necesitamos estar en cloud antes de julio")
- aggressive but not impossible if we start in Dec
- phased approach? non-critical DB first??
COMPARING WITH AWS — they got an Aurora pitch last week
- Jorge: "AWS nos ofreció créditos pero no sé si Aurora aguanta nuestro workload"
- we need to counter with BYOL savings + Exadata compatibility story
- also mention: ADB on Exadata = same engine, zero refactoring

Jorge keeps mentioning "el board quiere resultados rápidos"
they had a failed Azure POC last year — "mala experiencia" — don't bring it up
Ana asked about autonomous features — "¿se parchea solo de verdad?" she seemed skeptical but interested
DR site is 500km away — FastConnect already in both DCs?? need to check
budget: Jorge hinted at $1.5M first year target — doable with BYOL

Next steps: follow-up call Thursday, bring pricing estimate + draft architecture