Ten-fold speed boost validates SRO Victoria’s Oracle refresh

The State Revenue Office (SRO) Victoria has dramatically improved transaction processing time after revamping its online-services infrastructure in a systems overhaul based on Oracle’s Exadata Database Machine hardware and Oracle Fusion Middleware software platforms.

The migration comes as SRO, which collects over $11b in revenue for the state each year, works to streamline tax administration with initiatives such as the introduction of self-service portals for payroll tax (PTXpress), land tax (LTXpress), and stamp duty and declarations of trust (Duties Online).

Each of those user-facing portals will be shifted onto the Oracle Exadata platform (a server that grew out of Oracle’s purchase of Sun Microsystems) to enable real-time processing and data access. This shift will offer a marked improvement on batch processing that could previously take up to 24 hours.

Also to be hosted on the platform will be core systems like the SRO’s e-Sys revenue and tax management application; Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition; and other third-party applications.

The new infrastructure will support high volumes of online transactions and has already cut batch processing time by three times, with business intelligence matching times cut by seven times. Backups run four times faster, and dev-and-test provisioning runs twice as quickly.

“We’re extremely happy with what we have been able to achieve so far with Oracle Exadata and Oracle Fusion Middleware,” commented Paul Dulfer, CIO at the Victorian State Revenue Office in a statement.

“Ultimately, our aim is to improve the level of service to both Victorian taxpayers and to the Victorian Government and this deployment is delivering on both fronts.”

The infrastructure is also being used in a project that will build on the Oracle BPM Suite, SOA Suite and WebLogic Suite to automate a range of back-end processes, with additional taxation collection functions planned to be added in the future.

“The SRO’s use of Oracle Exadata is an excellent example of the power of engineered systems,” said Robert Wickham, head of Exadata and Strategic Solutions with Oracle ANZ. “To achieve average performance improvements of 10 times and data compression of up to 28 times is a great achievement, as is the vast reduction in batch processing times.” – David Braue