Open Universities Australia has handed Rimini Street a major support deal after Oracle decided to stop providing full support for the software used by the online education provider for its student management platform.
The third-party Oracle and SAP software maintenance and support provider was awarded a deal by Open Universities Australia to support its highly-customised version of the Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions suite.
The student management system used by Open Universities Australia (OUA), which provides online higher education in the local market, is based on the Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions offering. OUA’s system supports over 50,000 students.
The platform is used for enrolment, retaining student records and exam results, providing historical information on what a student has studied and what they are planning to study, among other tasks.
The deal with Rimini Street to manage and maintain the platform came after Oracle ceased full support for the release of the software suite in use by OUA, as it reached end-of-life, instead placing it into Oracle Sustaining Support.
According to OUA, this new support option attracted higher costs and reduced service provision compared to the prior support the organisation received.
Prompted by the shift in support from Oracle, the online education provider began exploring alternative support options for its current release in a bid to avoid an expensive, labour-intensive and disruptive upgrade project.
“Oracle PeopleSoft Campus Solutions is a core system for us, so when Oracle stopped full support for our current release it presented us with a huge challenge,” OUA head of IT, Rob Pickering, said.
“Not only were we getting very limited support from Oracle for our software for expensive annual fees, but on top of that Oracle doesn’t support any of our customisations with their standard maintenance program.
“Further, upgrading our existing software release presented too many risks and costs with too little ROI [return on investment], and was definitely not an option,” he said.
According to Pickering, OUA estimated that it would only need to use 20 per cent of the latest PeopleSoft Campus Solutions release. As such, OUA wanted to build a different kind of support strategy by leveraging Rimini Street’s services.
“We now have an even more robust support model and service for our existing production software release, support for our customisations and a guaranteed, minimum additional 15 years of comprehensive support without any required upgrades,” Pickering said.
