How migrating from Oracle to Db2 for SAP applications can reduce your total cost of ownership.

Databases are truly the engine driving better outcomes for businesses — they’re running your cloud-native apps, generating returns on your investments in AI, and the backbone supporting your data fabric strategy. 

Built for the world’s mission-critical workloads, IBM Db2 accelerates time-to-value through end-to-end management of transactional, operational and analytical data across any cloud. Db2’s decades of innovation and expertise built into the database have culminated today in the 2022 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice distinction for Cloud Database Management Systems. Db2 runs billions of transactions a day, enhances data security and compliance and adapts and scales to evolving workload demands to support your most-data intensive SAP applications.  

Discover how migrating from Oracle to Db2 for SAP applications reduces your total cost of ownership with better performance, lower licensing and fees, storage optimization, platform compatibility and cloud flexibility. 

1. Optimal price-performance for transactional and analytical workloads

As workload demand grows, Db2’s massively parallel processing (MPP) and multi-dimensional architecture helps you scale out and scale up data at petabyte size, enabling high performance and cost predictability for your database. 

For Finanz Informatik Technologie Service, migrating from Oracle to Db2 for SAP applications has led to: 

• 93% faster system copying
• 50% smaller data volumes for SAP Bank Analyzer, resulting in lower storage costs 
• EUR 350,000 annual cost savings

“Running SAP systems on IBM Db2 works well — both for us and for our clients. IBM’s licensing model is very appealing and many clients have asked us to switch their systems to Db2, seeing a reduction in licensing costs as a result. Most importantly, being able to offer clients a choice of database management system and deliver on their demands for IBM Db2 makes us more attractive as an SAP services provider.” — Michael Klüsener, Head of SAP Services, Finanz Informatik Technologie Service

2. Flexible licensing and fees

Db2 provides customers breathing room and flexibility when it comes to licensing in three ways: 

• Db2 offers sub-capacity licensing in a virtualized environment. For example, if you have a 100-core server but Db2 uses just one core, you only pay for that one core, not all 100. With Oracle, you can be charged a license fee for all the cores in a server. 
• Unlimited deployment of Db2 for SAP applications.
• Features like partitioning, database in-memory and advanced compression are included. Oracle, on the other hand, charges customers extra for these features.

For Owens-Illinois, the database migration included a multi-petabyte database underpinning 64 SAP systems in just a six-month migration period.

“The migration from Oracle to Db2 was well worth the journey . . . our company is going through a major digital transformation and we were looking at ways to cut our costs as well as ways to support our business . . . and as we looked at our databases, we looked at our platforms and we made a decision that IBM was the way to go. The benefits we saw from making the switch from Oracle to IBM are 7-figure cost reductions in our overall total cost of ownership, and we’ve seen at least 20-30% performance improvements in transactional response time”  – Rod Masney, CIO, Owens-Illinois 

3. Storage optimization and compression

Db2 uses deep compression technology to minimize storage space and improve database performance. 

For Siteco GmbH, migrating from Oracle to Db2 for SAP applications resulted in a seven-digit reduction in total cost of ownership, contributed by the following: 

• 54% improvement in storage capacity, in turn reducing backup and storage costs
• 27% faster SAP batch jobs and 30% faster web services
• Db2 compression helped against the already compressed Oracle database to reduce the database size

4. Platform support and compatibility

Db2 has 100% compatibility with SAP applications and built-in Oracle database SQL and PL/SQL compatibility. SAP offers a seamless migration tool — enabling for all business logic to stay put after migration from SAP applications running on Oracle to Db2.  ​

For Lion Brewery (LBCL), the team turned its IT dead-end into an opportunity to reconsider its information technology strategy and set themselves up to successfully enter new regional markets. With the compatibility of Db2 and SAP, they were able to migrate their systems in just under six months. Additionally, the migration resulted in the following: 

• 20% reduction in procure-to-pay cycle time.
• 40% cut in order-to-cash process time.
• 96 to 99.9 percent improvement in finished goods inventory accuracy 

“One of the issues we had faced previously was the constant need to consider compatibility of product and database releases. IBM and SAP work very closely at the strategic level to ensure that Db2 and SAP software releases coincide and offer the greatest possible functionality, reducing our costs and helping us gain the most value from our investments.” — Kasun Jayamaha, Manager – IT,  LBCL

5. Cloud flexibility

Unlike Oracle, SAP on Db2 systems can be moved to the cloud and run on any cloud vendor platform (e.g., AWS, Azure, GCP, Alibaba or IBM Cloud).

For GEO Corp, the cloud flexibility of IBM Db2 Warehouse on Cloud and powerful Oracle compatibility features eliminated the need for GEO to rewrite SAP applications that had originally been written for its previous Oracle database. The migration resulted in the following: 

• USD 32,000 weekly cost savings, with a 75% reduction in excess coupon distribution
• Nine million customers now receive personalized recommendations through association analysis

“The decisive factor was that Db2 Warehouse on Cloud supported SAP Predictive Analytics — the same analytics software that we had been using with our old Oracle Exadata platform . . . So it allows us to make good use of the know-how around ad hoc analysis that our team has already built up, which is very satisfying.” – Mr. Takeo Suzuki, Media Store Planning Department, Media Division, GEO Corporation

Learn more

Many businesses that switch from Oracle to IBM Db2 can see up to 80% cost savings. To get started, you can book a complimentary meeting with an IBM expert to discover your potential TCO savings.