A UK central government department running Oracle E-Business Suite, Database 19c, and WebLogic across two data centres reduced annual Oracle support spend from £2.56M to £1.15M — a saving of £1.4M per year — while achieving a 15-minute response SLA that Oracle's own Platinum Support never delivered.
The client is a UK central government department responsible for policy administration, public services delivery, and cross-departmental IT shared services. With over 4,200 staff and processing in excess of 12 million citizen interactions per year, the organisation runs a fully integrated Oracle estate covering finance, HR, procurement, and grants management on Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) R12.2.x. The estate spans two geographically separated data centres — one primary, one disaster recovery — and was subject to Crown Commercial Service (CCS) framework procurement requirements.
The department had been an Oracle customer since 2007. By 2025, cumulative licence and support costs had grown to represent 23% of the total IT budget — a figure that Treasury Spending Review pressure made untenable. The Director of Digital Infrastructure was tasked with identifying a minimum 15% reduction in software costs without disrupting services or creating compliance exposure.
| Product | Version | Usage | Environment |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oracle E-Business Suite | R12.2.11 | Finance, HR, Procurement, Grants | Primary + DR |
| Oracle Database | 19c (19.20) | EBS + reporting databases (6 instances) | Primary + DR |
| Oracle WebLogic | 12.2.1.4 | EBS application tier + integration middleware | Primary |
| Oracle Forms & Reports | 12c | Legacy citizen-facing forms (31 custom forms) | Primary |
| Oracle Identity Governance | 12c PS4 | Joiners/movers/leavers automation | Primary |
In Q3 2024, Oracle's public sector renewal team presented the department with a 22% uplift on its existing Platinum Support contract — from £2.1M to £2.56M annually. The justification given was "expanded platform coverage" and "AI-driven support tooling integration." No new functionality was being consumed. No new licences were required. The increase was entirely inflationary pricing pressure.
Simultaneously, the Oracle account team began recommending migration to Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, quoting an indicative implementation cost of £8.7M and a three-to-five year transition timeline. The department had invested £4.2M in EBS customisations over the preceding decade. The Fusion migration would render those customisations worthless. The Director of Digital Infrastructure described the situation: "Oracle was essentially asking us to pay more for what we had, and simultaneously lobbying us to spend £9M to replace it with something we didn't need."
Any support switch required OJEU-compliant (now equivalent UK public procurement) supplier assessment. The procurement team had six weeks to complete a mini-competition under the Digital Outcomes and Specialists (DOS) framework before the Oracle contract renewal deadline.
The Oracle estate handled OFFICIAL-SENSITIVE data. Third-party support providers had to demonstrate ISO 27001 certification, Cyber Essentials Plus compliance, and the ability to obtain SC-cleared engineers for on-site work if required.
31 custom Oracle Forms modules and 8 bespoke Oracle Reports required support coverage that Oracle's own Premier Support was reluctant to provide without costly Sustaining Engineering engagements. TPS had to demonstrate coverage for customised code, not just vanilla EBS releases.
The payroll run for 4,200 staff ran on the third working day of each month. The grants management cycle had statutory deadlines. Any support transition had to be completed without disrupting a single critical batch process or payment cycle.
GoVendorFree was introduced through the department's commercial broker following a pre-market engagement exercise. A structured five-week transition process was agreed before the Oracle contract termination date, with weekly governance checkpoints and a dual-running period to ensure zero service gap.
GoVendorFree engineers performed a full licence inventory against Oracle's records, mapped every customisation in the 31 Forms modules, reviewed patch levels, and established a baseline support scope document approved by the department's CTO.
GoVendorFree provided ISO 27001 certification, Cyber Essentials Plus evidence, and named-engineer CV packs (including SC clearance confirmation) to support the DOS mini-competition documentation. Contract was awarded inside the six-week window.
GoVendorFree and Oracle support ran in parallel. All six Database instances were shadow-monitored. The payroll run was supported by both providers simultaneously with GoVendorFree engineers on-call in the primary data centre.
Oracle contract terminated. GoVendorFree became sole support provider. Grants management month-end cycle processed without incident. Director of Digital Infrastructure signed off on the transition completion report.
Zero SLA breaches across 18 months. Three major critical incidents resolved at P1 within the 15-minute response commitment (Oracle's own records showed an average 2.4-hour P1 acknowledgement time on the prior contract). Quarterly business reviews provided to the Director of Digital Infrastructure and the department's Permanent Secretary.
| Support Component | Oracle Platinum (Annual) | GoVendorFree (Annual) | Saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| E-Business Suite R12.2.x | £1,080,000 | £472,000 | £608,000 |
| Database 19c (6 instances) | £740,000 | £334,000 | £406,000 |
| WebLogic 12.2.1.4 | £310,000 | £141,000 | £169,000 |
| Forms & Reports 12c | £280,000 | £126,000 | £154,000 |
| Identity Governance 12c | £150,000 | £76,000 | £74,000 |
| Total Annual | £2,560,000 | £1,149,000 | £1,411,000 |
Beyond the cost saving, the department achieved three secondary outcomes it had not anticipated. First, GoVendorFree's coverage of the 31 custom Oracle Forms modules removed the need for a separate annual maintenance contract with the original SI — saving an additional £190,000 per year. Second, the quarterly business reviews surfaced a duplicate Database licence for a decommissioned DR instance — a £94,000 annual PA cost that was immediately eliminated. Third, the Director of Digital Infrastructure was able to present a saving of over £1.6M per year (including secondary savings) to the Treasury Spending Review — exceeding the original 15% target by a factor of three.
"We were genuinely sceptical. Oracle's account team told us that no third-party provider could support a customised EBS estate at the depth we needed. Eighteen months later, we've had better incident response times, more proactive security guidance, and we've freed up £1.4 million a year for frontline delivery. We have not looked back."
The public sector Oracle estate is vast and underserved. Thousands of government departments, NHS trusts, local authorities, and arm's-length bodies run Oracle EBS, Database, or WebLogic estates that are fully functional, heavily customised, and completely unsuited to the cloud migration narrative Oracle's account teams push in every renewal conversation. Fusion Cloud ERP is not a like-for-like replacement for a customised EBS deployment. Oracle's own documentation acknowledges a 24–36 month implementation window and a 40–70% custom code rework requirement for complex estates.
Third-party support is fully legal, commercially sound, and increasingly normalised in public sector digital strategies. The G-Cloud framework (G-Cloud 14) includes third-party support providers. The DOS framework enables rapid procurement. Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) guidance does not preclude TPS engagements. The only barrier is the assumption — actively cultivated by Oracle — that switching support is technically risky. It is not.
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