A 14,000-employee precision engineering group faced simultaneous Oracle support escalation and Broadcom's VCF subscription mandate. Both renewals due in the same quarter. Both overpriced. One engagement resolved both — with a combined 63% cost reduction and a single point of support contact for the first time in fifteen years.
The group's IT leadership faced a convergence of commercial pressure that is increasingly common in enterprise IT: two major vendor renewals landing in the same quarter, both significantly above prior-year costs, both with deadlines framed as urgent by the vendor's sales teams.
Oracle's renewal was straightforward — standard uplift on the existing support contract, presented as non-negotiable. The Oracle support spend of £1,584,000/year covered Oracle Database Enterprise Edition on a half-rack Exadata X8M (48 processors) running JD Edwards EnterpriseOne and a custom manufacturing execution system (MES) built on Oracle Forms and Reports.
VMware's situation was more acute. Broadcom had eliminated the group's existing vSphere + vSAN SnS construct and replaced it with the VCF subscription mandate at £1,800,000/year — a 3.2× increase on the prior VMware SnS spend of £560,000/year. Broadcom's renewal team was explicit: VCF or nothing.
The IT Director, aware of both third-party support options and GoVendorFree's cross-vendor capability, initiated an independent assessment covering both contracts simultaneously.
Cross-vendor TPS engagements carry a specific complexity that single-vendor engagements do not. The group's Oracle Database deployment ran on Exadata hardware, which required careful delineation of software vs. hardware support responsibilities. The VMware estate was split across three data centres — Stuttgart (primary), Munich (DR), and Warsaw (branch) — with active vSAN stretched cluster replication between Stuttgart and Munich and a Horizon environment serving 1,200 virtual desktop users across 11 countries.
Full Oracle licence entitlement reconciliation — Exadata processor count, Core Factor documentation, JD Edwards user licence classification, and custom Forms/Reports licence entitlements. VMware inventory audit — vSphere EE+ processor count across all three DCs, vSAN capacity licensing, NSX-T actual deployment scope vs. VCF bundle scope, Horizon CCU vs. named user licence position.
Produced Oracle TPS coverage scope: Exadata DB layer, JD Edwards application TPS, custom code support, Forms/Reports, and GoldenGate CDC replication. Produced VMware TPS coverage scope: vSphere, vSAN (including stretched cluster), vCenter, NSX-T deployed components, and Horizon. Cost modelling showed combined TPS at £1,284,000/year — a £2,100,000 saving vs. the combined Oracle/VMware renewal ask of £3,384,000.
Oracle 30-day termination notice submitted. Oracle TPS onboarding: environment documentation, patch baseline, security patch review, JD Edwards custom orchestration catalogue. JD Edwards E1 production system migrated to TPS with 72-hour parallel monitoring period. First P1 incident (JD Edwards World Integration issue in Warsaw plant) resolved in 2 hours.
VMware SnS termination processed. VMware TPS onboarding: vSphere cluster documentation, vSAN health baseline, stretched cluster witness configuration documented, Horizon farm topology mapped. NSX-T micro-segmentation policy export and documentation. All three DC environments active on TPS by end of week 8. vSAN alert configuration tuned to TPS monitoring integration.
| Component | Vendor | TPS Coverage | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle DB EE 19c (Exadata) | Oracle | ✓ Full | DB engine, patches, ASM, RAC support on Exadata software layer |
| JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 9.2 | Oracle | ✓ Full | Application modules, custom orchestrations, Business Function Library |
| Oracle Forms & Reports 12c | Oracle | ✓ Full | Legacy MES front-end; Forms runtime and Reports Server |
| Oracle GoldenGate 21c | Oracle | ✓ Full | CDC replication Stuttgart ↔ Munich DR; trail file management |
| vSphere EE+ (all 3 DCs) | VMware | ✓ Full | ESXi hypervisor, HA/DRS, vMotion, all host profiles |
| vCenter Server 8.0 | VMware | ✓ Full | vCenter DB, VCSA, Update Manager, permissions |
| vSAN Enterprise (stretched) | VMware | ✓ Full | Stretched cluster Stgt–Munich, witness, disk group management |
| NSX-T (micro-seg only) | VMware | ✓ Deployed scope | DFW rules, security groups — not T0/T1 routing (not deployed) |
| Horizon Connection Server 8.x | VMware | ✓ Full | 1,200 CCU, App Volumes, UAG, Blast protocol |
| Exadata hardware layer | Oracle HW | Separate HW TPS | Physical cells, compute nodes — managed via independent HW support provider |
Annual saving on Oracle support — 58% reduction from £1,584,000 to £660,000/year. JD Edwards, Exadata DB, Forms/Reports, and GoldenGate all covered.
Annual saving vs. VCF mandate — 65% reduction from £1,800,000 to £624,000/year. Full vSphere/vSAN/NSX/Horizon coverage maintained.
Total annual saving across both Oracle and VMware — 63% reduction from £3,384,000 to £1,284,000/year. Three-year saving: £6,300,000.
Zero production incidents attributable to TPS transition across both Oracle and VMware workstreams. First P1 resolved 2 hours faster than Oracle Support SLA.
The group's IT Director redirected the £2.1M annual saving toward three strategic programmes: a MES modernisation initiative (replacing the Oracle Forms-based system with a cloud-native MES interface connecting to JD Edwards via REST APIs), an OT/IT network segmentation upgrade, and a pan-European SD-WAN rollout. All three had been deferred for four years due to infrastructure support cost constraints.
The cross-vendor single-provider model eliminated a persistent operational inefficiency: previously, incidents in the ERP/infrastructure stack required simultaneous Oracle and VMware support tickets with each vendor blaming the other's layer. Under TPS, one call resolves cross-stack issues — the TPS engineering team holds expertise in both Oracle Database/JD Edwards and VMware virtualisation layers.
"We went into this engagement expecting to save money. We did not expect to get a better service. The single point of contact for Oracle and VMware issues has changed how our operations team works. We used to spend weeks in Oracle-VMware finger-pointing loops. That does not happen any more."
Cross-vendor TPS is the most efficient way to address multiple large support contracts simultaneously. Get a combined cost model for your Oracle and VMware environments in 48 hours.
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Est. 2016 · 500+ clients · 40+ countries · 15-min response