Upgrade Oracle in a pandemic? No thanks! Why Kent County Council opted for third-party support

EBS support through Rimini Street will buy the Council time as well as saving 60 per cent on maintenance costs

The midst of a pandemic is not the best time to replace or upgrade a major part of the infrastructure stack, but Kent County Council's options were limited.

Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) underpins a large part of the Councils' IT stack including financial and HR functions. It is used daily by 1,800 core operatives plus 21,000 on a more casual basis. The Council first deployed it more than a decade ago and has seen it through a number of upgrades and modernisations, but with the Oracle Premium support contract expiring in April and the vendor's phasing out of Premium support for version 12.1.2 in December, strategic commissioner Vincent Godfrey and his colleagues were left with some tough decisions.

"If we wanted to stay with Oracle we effectively had two options: moving to 12.2.8 if we wanted to maintain a package service-type solution, or go on to cloud," he explained.

However, neither option was exactly ideal.

The on-prem choice would have meant a substantial amount of work at a time when everyone is flat out, because the step-up from v. 12.1.2 to v. 12.2.8 is a particularly complex one compared to previous upgrades, and hard to justify in terms of immediate benefits, Godfrey explained.

"It's a 12-month project and requires a lot of resources, it's a very big middleware upgrade. And from what we could see it did not do much in terms of functional improvements."

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The general trend in enterprises and local authorities alike is to shift large applications to the cloud, either through an incumbent supplier, or occasionally switching to a new one, but the timing wasn't right. Kent was able to afford neither the engineer time nor the potential disruption to services that a cloud move might entail, said Godfrey.

"We've got big improvement programmes ongoing in our children's services and adult social services, then there was the impact of Covid: it's all-consuming, there is no capacity to do much else than responding to Covid. As a council we're doing test and trace, rearranging recycling centres, even having to deal with things like testing the HGV drivers going back."

A forced march to cloud was particularly unwelcome at this point in time, therefore, and anyway there was no rush.

"We're not saying 'no' to cloud, we are actively evaluating it and continue to do so, but the market is in a very interesting place at the moment in terms of SaaS and PaaS, the dynamics are changing."

So Kent opted for a third option: third-party support. Services provider Rimini Street was chosen through a procurement process via the Government Digital Marketplace (G-Cloud), and with its support the Council's Oracle EBS 12.1.2 and underlying database will be maintained "for the foreseeable future", giving it more time to evaluate its roadmap. It will also save an estimated 60 per cent compared with Oracle Premium support, which equates to several millions of pounds.

"The public, rightly, expects that of every pound we have, as much as possible goes into frontline services," said Godfrey. "With a complex decision like this there has to be a very clear business case, showing it will ultimately deliver benefit to frontline services."

Applications and services can be modernised on top of EBS 12.1.2 and alongside it, Godfrey insisted, with any sunsetting a good few years away.

"The thing is, it's a good system, it's a very stable environment. So this buys us time to make sensible decisions about what we're doing going forward and pick and choose our times as to when we want to do it."