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It is reported that CBA experienced no business hours downtime during the migration from a non-cloud Peoplesoft DB2 to cloud-based Exadata over a weekend. "It is now running on a cluster, with multiple computers and multiple storage devices that support that application, but the application does not know, it's invisible to the application," Slee said.

"And CBA has been able to migrate this application from a siloed and dedicated infrastructure, on to their PaaS, which is Oracle Database on Exadata," Slee said. "And they could make the change in a weekend without having to change the application."

"Instead of having to figure out for themselves how they should architect these systems, what kind of servers to buy, and what kind of storage, and what kind of network, we've done all that work for them and we can deliver to them a private cloud computing infrastructure for database, called Exadata, and a private cloud computing infrastructure for middleware called Exalogic," Slee added. "And customers can move their existing applications into this [private cloud] environment and get all the benefits of the cloud and do so in a short time and at low risk."

CBA gained various savings from the database consolidation exercise on the OaaS platform. The savings included: reduced hardware costs for expensive servers, lowered operations system software and maintenance charges with 300 databases consolidated on a single OS; and lowered cost for managing the operations on a standard operating environment.

In the long run, CBA expects to achieve a higher utilization rate of assets, with fewer CPUs required and with reduced license fees. It will need to manage fewer Oracle environments with fewer operational tasks. In addition, CBA will require fewer full time staff to manage a consolidated database environment.

Nicholas Tan, head of infrastructure & platform solutions, Commonweath Bank of Australia, offered the following tips on enterprise PaaS implementation: