Decision details

Reason for the decision:

The Council’s support from Oracle for its E-Business Suite (EBS) expires on 5 April 2021. EBS is used for critical business processes in finance, human resources and procurement, including payroll and accounts payable. Oracle will stop providing its “Premier Support” for the version of EBS the Council uses in December 2021. Should the Council wish to retain this support from Oracle it would have to make a long-term commitment to them and undertake a programme of expensive and disruptive upgrades. Third-party support in terms of service levels is directly comparable to that from Oracle, but significantly lower cost.

Background: Provide brief additional context

Rimini Street is a well-established and proven provider of support for Oracle EBS (including the Local Government sector). Contracting for support from Rimini Street will secure service continuity for the foreseeable future and a significant financial saving. It will also give the Council time to consider its requirements for replacing EBS in the context of its strategic reset and financial constraints if that is necessary.

The Council’s EBS is hosted “on-premise” in the data centre at Sessions House. Arrangements for the close and migration of the data centre are being considered separately and are not affected by the provision of EBS support and vice versa. Third-party support can be provided if EBS is hosted on an Infrastructure-as-a-Services (IaaS) solution for example, without incurring additional cost relative to on-premise.

Options (other options considered but discarded):

Three options were considered. The first and preferred option is to procure third-party support as a direct replacement of the support provided by Oracle. A critical difference to support from Oracle is that it removes the option to upgrade to future versions of EBS without purchasing new licenses from Oracle, but does nonetheless provide the important updates for security, tax regulations etc.

Continuing with Oracle’s Premier Support for an “on-premise” instance beyond December 2021 requires the Council to upgrade to a new version (12.2.8). This is the last significant upgrade of EBS planned by Oracle. This option was discounted because it requires a fundamental and costly change in middleware (the software that lies between the operating system and the applications running on it), with limited opportunity to achieve functional and feature improvement. Ongoing costs will be significantly higher than those for third-party support.

Adopting a new Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) alternative to EBS was also considered; often referred to as a “cloud-based solution”. Transition to cloud, even an Oracle Cloud, is a substantial undertaking. The Council would be forced to “adopt” different business processes because SaaS offer little opportunity to “adapt” the software to the way the Council works. Whilst this may be desirable in the longer-term it is considered too disruptive in the near term. The associated implementation costs will run to millions of pounds and the ongoing costs are higher than those for third-party support. Given the context of the Council’s strategic reset and financial constraints this option was rejected but will be revisited as the strategic reset progresses.