Midmark improves performance by up to 75 percent by migrating and running Oracle on Azure

A technology-driven approach to designing better healthcare solutions

Medical, dental, and animal health solutions provider Midmark Corporation has a vision to change the status quo and transform healthcare experiences using innovative technology and design. Since the late 1960s, the company has put improving patient and caregiver relationships at the heart of everything it does. Now a leader in the design of clinical environments, Midmark manufactures a variety of products—including exam tables, cabinetry, animal containment, procedure lighting, dental imaging, sterilizers, and anesthesia equipment—that help make care as safe and comfortable as possible.

Midmark’s production activity and consumer base have ramped up over time through traditional growth and large-scale acquisitions, making the staff’s ability to quickly scale up and respond to demand more critical than ever to meet business goals. In particular, the long lead time to increase on-premises infrastructure affects Midmark’s ability to realize the benefits of rapid growth across the company. Recently, much of that growth has been centered in and around Midmark’s business-critical Oracle environments. “Almost every team at Midmark uses Oracle in some way—not just Oracle E-Business Suite (Oracle EBS) but also Oracle Agile and Oracle Cloud Human Capital Management,” notes Nick Timmerman, Senior Manager of Enterprise Cloud Services at Midmark Corporation. “For example, when calls come in from our customers, service tickets that meet certain criteria go from Oracle EBS into Oracle Agile so that our quality department can manage those inquiries.”

The company wanted the ability to flexibly scale on demand. At the same time, its blade servers and network storage were nearing end of support. “We were faced with purchasing more on-premises storage and compute or choosing to move to a more cloud-based solution,” says Timmerman. “Our recent focus on automation through Azure DevOps pipelines led us to take advantage of Oracle being in the cloud.”

Midmark considered adopting a multicloud strategy or going to a single cloud with Azure. The company recognized that it already had 100 subscriptions in Azure and that Microsoft was one of its key IT vendors for networking, storage, computing, and communication and collaboration with Microsoft 365 apps. “A big piece of how we’ve built and sustained our success is exploring how we can use the natural connectivity across platforms we already have,” says Timmerman.

Making the decision to move to Azure using Azure DevOps and Terraform

To solidify its decision to embrace Azure, Midmark evaluated how its critical Oracle EBS ran in different cloud environments. To do so, it enlisted the support of its cloud solution provider and Microsoft Solutions Partner, Crayon, along with Navisite, a Gold competency member of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Program. Azure met Midmark’s requirements for flexibility and scalability, so the company began migrating a wealth of infrastructure to Azure, including Oracle EBS, Oracle Agile, domain controllers, computers running SQL Server, file servers, and virtual machines, building out its infrastructure using Azure DevOps pipelines with HashiCorp Terraform code. It also used Oracle’s cloning process to move its on-premises development, testing, and production environments to Azure.

“Given that our hardware, compute, and storage were nearing end of support, 80 percent of our teammates were working with on-premises hardware that was four to five years old,” says Timmerman. “As we migrated to Azure, we were able to tap into faster processors and better hardware to run the Oracle environment, and performance improved by up to 75 percent.”

Bringing hundreds of servers and services to the cloud, setting the stage for more

Midmark’s move to the cloud included its EC-series Azure virtual machines, which the company helps safeguard using Microsoft Defender for Cloud. Of the nearly 600 servers in Midmark’s Azure environment, 95 percent run Windows Server. Staff use these servers to scan products and calculate sales tax to take standardized Electronic Data Interchange orders. To date, the company’s migration has covered more than 10 terabytes of data, and with the exception of one database, everything Oracle is now on Azure.

Being able to tap into native, value-added Azure services was a significant draw for Midmark, not only for maintaining existing capabilities and services that now run more efficiently and reliably on Azure but also for adopting new ones. “We run our domain controllers on Microsoft Entra ID, and being able to spin up new domain controllers in Azure and have them work seamlessly across Azure and on-premises is a major benefit,” says Timmerman. “We’ve now started getting into Azure Storage for our Oracle on Azure implementation, and we’re using Azure Application Gateway on the networking services side.” 

Seamlessly transitioning environments, accelerating growth, and building confidence

Despite all the rapid changes in Midmark’s IT landscape, its staff are now able to complete more tasks faster and more easily than they’re used to. As Jim Lathrop, Senior Oracle Apps Database Administrator at Midmark Corporation, remarks, “It wasn’t a huge change for our employees, who were able to quickly and productively interact with Oracle EBS on Azure.” The seamless transition is in part due to the close relationship between Midmark and Microsoft, along with Crayon and Navisite. “We have a regular cadence with our Microsoft account team, and that was extremely helpful as we made this journey alongside Crayon and Navisite,” adds Timmerman.

Comparing its current hybrid environment with its prior on-premises deployment, Midmark says it has heavily benefited from running Oracle on Azure. “To get the same flexibility we have in Azure, we would have to spend a lot more on-premises, including on more disk space and compute that we might not fully use,” explains Timmerman. “With the scalability we get with Azure, we have more control in our non-production environments, such as spinning up resources when they’re needed to support new projects or acquisitions and shutting them off when they’re not in use.”

Although Midmark expects to be running a hybrid model for the near term, it has a cloud-first roadmap. In fact, the company has found it increasingly difficult to justify why it wouldn’t go to the cloud with a new process given the many immeasurable benefits beyond traditional metrics like cost and resource optimization. “When we first experienced performance improvements after moving Oracle EBS to the cloud, we realized that migrating other on-premises services to Azure also greatly benefited employee perception,” says Timmerman. “There was hesitance and skepticism before, but we’ve now made it to the moon, planted the flag in the ground, and everyone’s cheering—it was a huge success. The question now is ‘What else can we move to Azure?’ not ‘Why should we be moving stuff to Azure?’”

Midmark advances toward its mission

Most meaningful of all the changes, Midmark believes its new IT environment with Oracle on Azure will help advance its desire to give back to the communities it serves, driving better care and patient outcomes. “We have flexibility with Oracle on Azure, but flexibility without structure is just chaos,” says Timmerman. “Because we’re using Azure DevOps and other Microsoft products, we’ve been able to standardize our delivery with infrastructure as code. This lets us be more flexible and have a higher level of quality and confidence, which empowers us to adapt as our priorities change.”

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