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Success at a Glance

If you want to experience a microcosm of the United States—of our world, really—the City of Oakland is the place to be. Bordered by rolling hills on the east and 19 miles of coastline on the west, the Northern California city is home to a bustling, culturally diverse population of more than 404,000 residents.

Oakland's human richness is complemented by its wide range of recreational activities, from the arts and sports to outdoor festivals and lectures. Settled by Ohlone Indians in 1200 B.C. and incorporated as a city in 1852, Oakland has garnered praise from the likes of Forbes magazine, which ranked it as the tenth best city for business in the U.S. in 2001.

Police officers, firefighters, administrative personnel, librarians and city planners are among the 5,000 employees that keep the city humming each day. And behind the scenes, helping to ensure that these employees—along with 2,000 city retirees—get their paychecks on time every 2 weeks is a payroll system based on Oracle Financials running on a Sun Enterprise 10000 server. Before the City migrated its application to a Sun platform, payroll was an arduous task.

Running Oracle Financials on a DEC Alpha 8400 server, the City experienced slow processing times, inaccurate payroll data and diminishing productivity because it couldn't run other financial applications concurrently with the payroll program. So, when DEC was acquired and its hardware platform was no longer supported, the City of Oakland made the decision to migrate its applications and data to a more robust, scalable platform.

An extensive evaluation of vendors was narrowed down to Sun, Compaq and IBM, with Sun winning the engagement in the end. The City worked closely with Sun Services to migrate its financial applications and data to a Sun Enterprise 10000 server powered by UltraSPARC microprocessors and running the Solaris 8 Operating System.

"In our own benchmarking tests, the Sun Enterprise 10000 server demonstrated superior capabilities over products from the other vendors," says Ken Gordon, Strategic Operations Division Manager for the IT Department for the City of Oakland. Adds Patrick Simon, CTO and Director of the IT Department for the City of Oakland, "And Sun Services was correct fit for the migration project because its consultants are skilled in Solaris and Sun Enterprise server technologies.