Cases/02 · Product & commercial
A leading Nordic pharma-client running its core operational platform on a legacy Oracle estate. The platform was steady — and generated a two-figure % of company margin. It was also outpacing the business in the wrong direction: rising maintenance costs, inflexible operations, and a strategic ceiling on what the business could do commercially or with AI.
Challenge
The platform had to move. A like-for-like migration to a new host would lift the maintenance burden but miss the strategic opportunity. A cloud-native architecture would unlock AI-readiness and turn the liability into a growth asset — but it was bigger, more expensive, and required board-level approval rather than departmental sign-off.
What was done
The strategic case was built and defended at board level — to the parent company's executive management and a board of directors comprised of senior executives from across Danish life sciences. The case was anchored in executive sparring and multiple specialist workshops with the receiving organisation, so the migration was designed with — not handed to — the people who would run it. The board got a defendable trajectory, not a slide deck to rubber-stamp.
The scope covered the strategy and migration design. The build and cutover were owned by the receiving organisation, with the architecture and business case set up to hold.
Outcome
Several million euros of strategic cloud capital secured at executive and board level.
Core platform (a two-figure % of company margin) on a path to a modern, AI-ready architecture.
Business case actively defended at board level, not signed off without challenge.
Practitioner
Simon — Strategy, Cloud architecture, Board-level commercial defence.
Where this fits
This case maps to 'Our product and commercial structure is holding us back'. The legacy Oracle estate had become an inflexible operational platform — outpaced by shifting market dynamics, constraining what the business could do commercially. The migration unlocked that constraint. The engagement combined an Analysis (the strategic case for cloud-native versus lift-and-shift) with Strategy (presenting and defending the case at board level).