HealthTech leader saves $700K/yr outsourcing database management

The customer—a global healthcare technology provider renowned for its advanced medical devices and patient care solutions—serves hospitals, clinics, and healthcare professionals worldwide. The organization is dedicated to driving innovation that improves patient outcomes and enhances healthcare efficiency. With over 1,900 database assets, the company's IT infrastructure is critical to supporting its global manufacturing and business operations.

The healthcare technology provider faced significant challenges managing its complex and extensive database ecosystem supporting critical manufacturing and business applications. They lacked deep in-house expertise for their mission-critical Oracle Exadata environments, including new ExaCC systems.

Their database management and support was fragmented across multiple vendors, leading to operational inefficiencies and inconsistent quality. Furthermore, inadequate proactive monitoring across diverse database platforms (Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL) resulted in reactive issue management, impacting stability, particularly for high-availability manufacturing systems requiring minimal downtime. The company needed a unified strategy to enhance reliability, standardize operations, and gain specialized technical skills for its complex environment.

Pythian's full service approach to database management enabled operational resilience and supported sustained business operations across the healthcare leader's global footprint. Pythian optimized database performance and set up infrastructure for easier scalability. As a result of the health-tech company outsourcing database management to one single partner, they saw significant cost savings, and strengthened capabilities to drive innovation globally.

Pythian provided 24/7 support, monitoring, and Oracle Exadata expertise

Recognizing the urgent need to resolve these challenges, the company partnered with Pythian to implement a comprehensive database management strategy. Pythian’s full service approach to database managed service includes 24/7 support, monitoring and continuous performance optimizations across their database technologies Oracle, SQL Server, PostgreSQL. Pythian provides the healthcare providers with consistency and centralized oversight crucial for their complex database environments. Pythian's team created standardized processes for database creation, retirement, and operational tasks, backed by clear escalation procedures and a well-documented approach to proactive monitoring.

A major focus involved enhancing the monitoring infrastructure, implementing NFS monitoring for Exadata, improving Oracle Enterprise Manager (OEM) alerting, integrating SolarWinds DPA for performance analysis, deploying Prometheus and Grafana for PostgreSQL, and automating ServiceNow ticket creation from alerts.

Crucially, Pythian provided the specialized Oracle Exadata expertise the internal team lacked, performing critical optimization tasks such as resolving SAP memory configuration issues impacting manufacturing, setting up FastRecovery Area monitoring, establishing dynamic CPU scaling, and standardizing configurations across PostgreSQL instances.

Over $700K in annual savings with better database support management, boosted performance

Pythian's database management solution delivered significant, measurable improvements, transforming the healthcare leader's database operations from a reactive to a proactive model. The company experienced enhanced system performance and reliability, evidenced by reduced P1 incidents. Proactive optimization and proper resource configuration significantly improved manufacturing system stability, addressing critical SAP ME performance issues in production facilities—all while generating over $700K in annual savings by replacing fragmented systems.

The engagement provided essential specialized Oracle Exadata skills previously lacking internally, enabling proper maintenance and performance tuning. Operational efficiency increased through unified ticket management across technologies (processing over 1,600 tickets monthly with a 98% closure rate) and standardized change management and lifecycle procedures across the 1,900+ database assets.

Security and compliance were also strengthened through verified backups, successful quarterly SOX restore testing, regular patching, and secure access protocols, ensuring the company meets strict healthcare industry requirements.