Rimini Street breaks University of Melbourne out of its cycle of Oracle upgrades

Rimini Street has been tapped by the University of Melbourne to provide support for a range of Oracle systems to break out of a “perpetual cycle of upgrades”.

The university selected the global service provider’s Rimini Support, Rimini Connect and Rimini Protect for its Oracle Database, EBS and Hyperion systems, which are used to support the institution’s 55,000 students and 10,000 staff, following mounting issues with its existing vendor support.

Those problems included a lack of support for customisations and a lag in responsiveness, which saw some tickets left unaddressed for months at a time.

“In order for us to remain supported by the vendor, we had to continually upgrade on their timeline just so when we put in a ticket, they don’t come back to us and say, ‘Sorry, but you’re not on a version we support anymore’,” said University of Melbourne director of enterprise technology Daniel Buttigieg.

“We were stuck in a perpetual cycle of upgrades, each one taking months of preparation, testing and deployment. The risks were equally high. If an upgrade or security patching goes wrong, we could lose access to things like our ERP [enterprise resource planning] or identity management system, which can be catastrophic for an organisation of our size and the number of staff and students that we have.

“We weren’t seeing an investment in the platform that was appropriate to the size of the support cost that we were paying. So, moving over to Rimini Street and not getting access to those newer releases really wasn’t impacting us because we weren’t seeing the value of that investment through our support costs.”

Buttigieg said through the savings made by switching to Rimini Street, the university is reinvesting and refocusing on developing digital solutions and enhancing online access for its users.

 Additionally, the University of Melbourne does not have to worry about support for core systems and having dedicated funds and teams focused on “unnecessary upgrade activities”.

Of the three solutions from Rimini Street, Rimini Connect is being used to ensure compatibility with email services and utilising the latest security protocols. Meanwhile, Buttigieg added that Rimini Support “keeps our systems running smoothly” and Rimini Protect “offers us proactive protection against threats and vulnerabilities”.

 “The education industry is highly competitive, and staying on the forefront of innovation requires investment of people, time and money,” said Rimini Street vice president of industry team and retail solutions Dion Rooney.

“We’ve helped many higher learning institutes across Australia, New Zealand and abroad, accelerate their timeline to executing their vision simply by providing better support and the ability to optimise and redirect their resources towards modernisation and strategic initiatives.”

The University of Melbourne also utilises Rimini Street for its Salesforce support, with the provider using its expertise for the university’s Mobile Learning Unit.