NBCC Modernizes PeopleSoft on OCI with Cloud Manager Automation and Autonomous Database 26ai

Summary

New Brunswick Community College (NBCC), in conjunction with their partner SMACT Works, deployed PeopleSoft Cloud Manager 21 on OCI to automate lifecycle management and significantly reduce environment setup time. Using Policy Manager for scheduled orchestration, they lowered non-production costs.

Additionally, NBCC migrated to Oracle Autonomous Database 26ai, eliminating routine DBA tasks while enabling auto-scaling and improving performance. With Autonomous Data Guard, they strengthened disaster recovery through near real-time data protection and minimal administrative effort, achieving an estimated 35–40% reduction in operational costs.

Customer comments

New Brunswick Community College implemented PeopleSoft Cloud Manager 21 on OCI as the central control plane for lifecycle and environment management. We standardized provisioning, cloning, and patching using Cloud Manager pipelines, eliminating manual build processes and reducing environment setup time from days to hours.

A key innovation was the use of scheduled environment orchestration for non-production systems (DEV/TEST/TRAIN). Using Policy Manager, environments are automatically shut down during off-hours and restarted based on defined schedules, directly reducing OCI compute consumption and driving measurable cost savings.

We enabled automated PeopleTools and PUM image patching, enforcing a repeatable, governed update cadence aligned with Oracle best practices. This significantly reduced regression risks and improved patch adoption timelines.

As part of the modernization, we upgraded PeopleTools from 8.59 to 8.62, applied Campus Solutions PUM Image 35, and transitioned search from Elasticsearch to OpenSearch. This improved search performance, scalability, and long-term supportability.

Overall, Cloud Manager shifted New Brunswick Community College from reactive administration to policy-driven, automated operations, improving system reliability, reducing manual effort, and optimizing ongoing operational efforts.

New Brunswick Community College migrated its PeopleSoft database from OCI DBCS 19c to Oracle Autonomous Database 26ai, adopting a fully managed, AI-optimized database platform. This eliminated routine DBA activities such as patching, backups, and performance tuning, allowing the team to focus on application-level outcomes.

The migration leveraged Autonomous Database capabilities including auto-scaling (elastic compute), automatic indexing, and self-tuning query optimization, resulting in improved batch performance and more consistent online response times.

We implemented Autonomous Data Guard replication, strengthening disaster recovery posture with minimal administrative overhead and near real-time data protection.

A key outcome was the ability to dynamically scale compute up/down based on workload demand, avoiding over-provisioning. Combined with the elimination of database management overhead, this resulted in an estimated 35–40% reduction in operational costs.

This initiative modernized the data layer into a resilient, self-managing platform, improving availability, performance, and cost efficiency, while aligning with Oracle’s AI-driven database strategy.

New Brunswick Community College is currently pursuing innovations around Autonomous DB AI capabilities such as Select AI and Oracle AI Database Private Agent Factory as POC to build scalable chatbot and AI solutions for students.