Rimini Street to reduce reliance on Oracle
Rimini Street, Inc., a global provider of enterprise software products and services, the leading third-party support provider for Oracle and SAP software products, and a Salesforce partner, today announced that Racing and Wagering Western Australia (RWWA), a national leader in racing and wagering entertainment, has switched from Oracle to Rimini Street for better, more responsive support and advanced security for its Oracle database and Oracle technology landscape. The move helps RWWA to achieve its strategic plan to reduce its reliance on Oracle products as cloud-native and open-source offerings become viable for the organization, providing RWWA with more deployment and usage flexibility, reduced enterprise software operating expenses and improved security.
“The wagering sector is a competitive one in Australia and companies need a level of flexibility in their systems to provide new services while staying online,” said Daniel Benad, group vice president and regional general manager, Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, Rimini Street. “Sports wagering is now a 24/7/365 business, and clients are increasingly turning to organisations that offer the best ‘always on’ experience during big events. To do that, wagering companies can’t afford to spend their limited IT budget solely on enterprise software operating costs; they need to be able to invest more of their IT budget in innovation and continuously update their offerings to stay ahead of their competition.”
Moving Ahead of the Pack with More Budget to Innovate
The RWWA identified a need to invest in its customer engagement as well as machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities as wagering became an increasingly online business, particularly during the pandemic when its business shifted from its retail brick-and-mortar stores to managing online wagering at high volumes. It has also been on a journey to shift its infrastructure platform from on-premises to cloud, a shift set to be completed by the end of the year.
“The better we can understand our customers, the better we can give them the service they want, when they want it,” said Grey Properjohn, head of technology at RWWA. “Wagering on racing and sport in general is now an anytime, anywhere offering, and we wanted to ensure that we could continue to innovate to provide the experience our customers deserve and expect.”
Oracle Database and Oracle Technology platforms, while mature and reliable, were proving to be high cost. Furthermore, security patches offered by Oracle for its platforms were time consuming, resource-intensive, costly to implement and often did not fix the root cause of security issues.
RWWA turned to Rimini Street support as its selected option to achieve its goals, signing a contract with Rimini Street through Australia’s Whole of Government Agreement, with the Company providing support for RWWA’s Oracle footprint. RWWA also selected and implemented Rimini Street’s Advanced Database Security which provides RWWA with an innovative security solution with a fast time-to-protect for its database in comparison to Oracle’s traditional, dated software vendor patching approach.
Rimini Street Security Solutions Enable Peace of Mind
Software vendor patching is often ineffective due to late delivery, complexity to apply code patches, and the expense of extensive regression testing before moving patches into production environments. By comparison, Rimini Street’s Advanced Database Security protects databases from known and unknown vulnerabilities by monitoring and analysing database communications traffic and blocking attempted attacks before they reach the database.
RWWA also now benefits from Rimini Street’s industry-leading service level agreement of 10-minute response times for all critical Priority 1 cases. In addition, RWWA is assigned a Primary Support Engineer with an average of 20 years’ experience in enterprise software and backed by a team of global functional and technical engineers, available 24/7/365.
Having a dedicated support engineer and security team is critical to RWWA during the organization’s busiest periods, such as during the annual Melbourne Cup, known as ‘the race that stops a nation’ in Australia and a period which sees huge increases in traffic to wagering platforms across the country.
“Having direct access to a dedicated, local support engineer assigned specifically to us, gave us peace of mind to operate during the most critical periods of the Melbourne Cup, knowing that any issue would be addressed quickly should one arise because they were available and nearby,” said Properjohn. “This is a huge weight off our shoulders as vendor support is often overseas and they don’t have the level of knowledge of our environment in the way Rimini Street’s dedicated local engineer does. That level of service and availability from Rimini Street during a high period of activity was and is greatly appreciated.
Their security offering has also delivered everything we’ve needed in the time we’ve worked with them, and concurrently removed the need for resource-intensive vendor patching. This has allowed us to free up staff dedicated to costly patching and regression testing cycles to instead focus their efforts on more high-value initiatives, such as our innovation in the cloud.”
