Kuwait Armed Forces
Background
Kuwait Armed Forces consists of several joint forming defense forces. The governing bodies are the Kuwait Ministry of Defense,
the Kuwait Ministry of Interior, the Kuwait National Guard and the Kuwait Fire Service Directorate. The Emir of Kuwait is the
commander-in-chief of all defense forces and the Crown Prince is the deputy commander.
The early military structured organization which first dealt with security and the military following the engagements of Kuwait
Army's infantry and cavalry protecting the three mounted defensive walls (third defensive wall mounted in 1920) of Kuwait prior
and following to World War I, was the Directorate of Public Security Force, formed during the Inter-war period and mainly after
World War II. The Directorate of Public Security Force already included the partnership integration of the Kuwait Army and
Directorate of Police as independent forces following the formation of the first cabinet on June 17, 1962 after the independence.
In 1953, the Kuwait Army split from the Directorate of Public Security Force; the latter merged with the Directorate of Police
in 1959, giving formation to the newly established Kuwait Ministry of Interior. The Ministry of Interior includes the Kuwait
Coast Guard and has several military commanders, designated by government protocol as assistant ministers undersecretaries,
each reporting to the Minister of Interior who is designated by protocol as Deputy Prime Minister of the State of Kuwait.
Business Needs & Challenges
Kuwait Armed Forces were running their home-grown Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application for years on the Oracle
Forms, Oracle Reports and Oracle Database platforms. Despite continuous efforts to modernize this platform, it was not
an east task. What made it more difficult is Oracle's decision to discontinue support for these platforms. Kuwait Armed
Forces faced the following challenges:
- Running the application on Web required a specific browser version. This is too restrictive.
- It is not possible to access the application from mobile devices.
- The Client-Server architecture of Oracle Forms makes it difficult to scale the application and meet performance and scalability needs.
- Providing Self-Service to KAF employees is not possible with this architecture.
Characteristics of a viable solution
Kuwait Armed Forces made a decision to migrate its platform to a modernized one. A cornerstone of this vision is to
migrate the Oracle Database to Microsoft SQL Server in order to reap the benefits of using Integration, Reporting
and Analysis Services alongside the database engine. This cost-effective solution will provide the basis for the
modernized application platform.
Solution
Kuwait Armed Forces utilized Sharper Software's Oracle to SQL Server migration services to migrate their database to
SQL Server. During the migration, it was not possible to migrate certain packages, stored procedures, functions and
other database objects automatically using the SQL Server Migration Assistant for Oracle. Some of these objects were
obfuscated for security reasons. For these objects, Sharper Software's experts managed to recreate these objects manually
and matched the expectations of the customer. The result is a fully-functional database that matched the Oracle database
99.99% and the customer is now capable of modernizing the applications platform with ease.
