Boston’s PeopleSoft Modernization on AWS with ERPA Boosts Performance and Avoids a Costly Outage

The City of Boston modernized the core infrastructure running its human resources and financial systems to replace outdated mainframe infrastructure that was inefficient, complex, and exposed to security risks. The city’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that runs on PeopleSoft serves 18,000 employees and enables the management of a $4.2 billion annual budget. By migrating the system to Amazon Web Services (AWS) and re-platforming its DB2 databases to Amazon RDS, the city created a robust, modern system that delivers high performance, industry-leading security, streamlined operations, and reduced maintenance costs with a software as a service (SaaS)-like experience through managed services with consulting firm ERPA.

The City of Boston’s ERP system that runs on PeopleSoft is critical to its ability to hire, manage, and pay its workforce, plus its ability to manage financial systems citywide. “The PeopleSoft system impacts how the city performs everything from public safety, public schools, our parks, and our public works to our diversity and inclusion initiatives,” explains Santiago Garces, the city’s chief information officer. “This system empowers our employees and is the gateway for doing business with the City of Boston.”

Software updates and security patches were no longer available for the legacy mainframe technology supporting the PeopleSoft system, creating significant security risks for the city and limiting its ability to leverage advanced PeopleSoft-native features. Further, managing this aging infrastructure was costly and time-consuming, and increasing retirements among the technology team created a scarcity of resource availability and skill sets.

The City of Boston engaged AWS Partner ERPA— a leader in enterprise application management, cloud modernization, and consulting services—to modernize the PeopleSoft system. This massive undertaking included migrating to AWS utilizing ActiveGenie, ERPA’s proprietary AWS cloud orchestration service that features extensive automation and DevOps methodologies for efficient cloud migration, infrastructure management, and application management.

The project also included re-platforming the city’s large mainframe DB2 databases to Amazon Relational Database Service for Oracle (Amazon RDS for Oracle)  and updating the PeopleSoft application and toolset versions. The city continued leveraging ERPA’s managed services model for its PeopleSoft application and databases and AWS infrastructure for a software as a service (SaaS)-like experience. This ensures ongoing application updates and enables the city’s technology team to focus on higher-value projects.

“The City of Boston wanted specific service levels for performance, reliability, scalability, security, and compliance—all with a predictable cost structure,” says Kiran Beeravelli, chief innovation officer and cofounder of ERPA. “We knew AWS technologies would enable us to deliver.”

The timing for this project was impeccable, as the city’s team soon learned. “Two weeks after we went live with the cloud environment, our mainframe databases suffered a failure, and it took us over three weeks to recover them,” says Garces.

He explains that this outage would have delayed 36,000 paychecks to employees and $5 million in vendor invoices, which would have caused significant pain throughout Boston and damaged the city’s reputation. “We avoided all of that because our PeopleSoft is now running on AWS,” Garces says.

In addition to enabling business continuity, the PeopleSoft modernization project delivered significant benefits immediately, starting with improved platform and application stability that rose to 99.999 percent. The move to Amazon RDS also ensured high availability with built-in, automated failover for enhanced durability.

The solution leverages several AWS-native services including Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), and Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) to store data with unmatched security, scalability, compliance, and audit capabilities, which are all critical for the sensitive data managed through this system. Additionally, the solution uses Amazon FSx to deliver access-from-anywhere capabilities for one of the city’s most important shared drives.

With Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), the city gained secure, scalable computing power in the cloud, ensuring that the system could meet fluctuating demand and making the platform “blazing fast,” according to Beeravelli. He adds that the more modern system enables faster adoption of new PeopleSoft features. “The time to uptake new feature functionality has been cut from three years down to two months,” he says.

The city’s PeopleSoft system on AWS now includes an automatic monitoring process and full cross-region disaster recovery capabilities. “We’re getting more value for our level of investment,” says Garces.

The move to AWS paired with application and infrastructure management from ERPA enabled the city to replace a complex set of restrictive, expensive database licenses with a single license for the cloud-based managed services model, streamlining management. “We had over 20 contracts for the different components that needed to get licensed, and we were able to reduce that to just one agreement with ERPA. That’s really helpful,” explains Garces.

With the AWS-powered system up and running, there’s a new dynamic among Boston’s technology team because it is no longer consumed by infrastructure management and administrative tasks. “By leveraging a managed services business model in the cloud, we’re able to shift our focus more on the business needs and on engaging with departments and end users,” says Garces. “ERPA is a really willing partner, not only for the execution of the project, but afterward in helping us use our new-found breathing room to get more value out of the ERP.”