Hitachi Consulting UK has announced that it has successfully completed the merging and optimisation of financial and commercial procurement ERP systems for Arqiva, the communications infrastructure and media services company, following its merger with the former National Grid Wireless (NGW). Hitachi Consulting used the Oracle SOA Suite and Application Integration Architecture (AIA) to standardise and optimise Arqiva's back-office processes, minimise disruption to day-to-day operations, and provide the company with a simplified and integrated future platform for its applications estate.

Arqiva operates at the heart of the broadcast and mobile communications industry and is at the forefront of network solutions and services. The company provides much of the infrastructure behind television, radio and wireless communications in the UK and has a significant presence in Ireland, mainland Europe and the United States.

"We needed a complete migration of our back-office legacy-NGW systems into our existing Oracle eBusiness Suite," said Steve Gregory, IT Director for Arqiva. "Hitachi Consulting helped us successfully migrate and consolidate the data, systems and processes, and took the lead on implementing an SOA middleware platform so that we could integrate our line-of-business systems with our ERP environment. We had limited expertise in-house and Hitachi Consulting provided us with senior, experienced consultants, with deep technical insight into the Oracle Middleware platform. We'd worked with them previously and were impressed with their flexibility and ability to meet tight delivery deadlines. Without this migration, we would have found it increasingly difficult to run our business effectively. We now have a future-proof platform for our ERP applications. As we continue to de-duplicate our non-ERP systems, we can use the SOA Middleware Platform to simplify our IT estate and componentise our approach to integration moving forward."

In total, the migration of the legacy-NGW systems increased the size of Arqiva by approximately 50 percent and included the migration and integration of critical line-of-business systems, such as Keep, which now provides a master source of site data for all Arqiva's estate, including the management of key assets that are distributed across some 9,000 sites. The ten-month project included integration of Oracle with some of the 130 active business applications covering a wide range of Arqiva's functions. The core business systems are intensively accessed by approximately 400 users and occasionally accessed by approximately 1,500 users.