SCEE now able to refocus budget and its IT resources
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 Southern Cross Electrical Engineering (SCEE) has switched to Rimini Street for support of its Oracle applications. The agreement enables SCEE to better maintain its Oracle applications during a business expansion and amidst an industry wide IT skills shortage.
In addition, the support from Rimini Street means SCEE has freed up budget and IT resources to focus on innovation and transformation projects which improve the efficiency and competitiveness of the entire organization.
“An investment in enterprise software should drive a business forward, not hold it back,” said Daniel Benad, group vice president and regional general manager, Oceania, Rimini Street. “Unfortunately for many organizations, annual maintenance fees from the vendor aren’t just expensive, but they drain valuable internal resources. These two factors conspire to constrict innovation in businesses across the globe, when maintenance and support should do the opposite and provide businesses with the flexibility and time to strategically develop their smart path forward.”
SCEE is a leading electrical, instrumentation, communication and maintenance services company which has operated in Australia since 1978. The organisation is comprised of business units and acquisitions which span commercial, mining, industrial, utilities, transport, and energy infrastructure, with a focus on decarbonisation. These units leverage skills and systems off each other, with a goal of partnership across the business to improve efficiency. The Group ICT function is to simplify the systems and processes in use across the varying units and ensure that collaboration is optimized.
SCEE leverages a shared-service platform to optimize costs and value
SCEE relied on its Oracle applications as a shared technology platform, but the Company experienced expensive vendor software support costs and required an excessive amount of internal IT resources to manage the platform. Furthermore, the software vendor was requiring a mandatory, expensive, and unnecessary upgrade to maintain full vendor support, despite SCEE’s current release being stable, proven and meeting its needs.
“Annual support and maintenance from Oracle was just too expensive, and the various nuances made the applications difficult to manage internally – it was not meeting our needs,” said Imre Szabo, Group ICT Manager, SCEE.
Without available internal resources, SCEE was unable to focus on its strategy to build a business application platform that fosters collaboration and optimizes efficiency and productivity across the group. SCEE wanted to find a way it needed to find a way to avoid a costly upgrade while reducing both the costs of annual maintenance and the internal labour effort required by its IT team to keep the system running smoothly and reliably.
The company began looking third party options and turned to Rimini Street to take over the maintenance and support of its Oracle applications.
“Five Star” support and additional budget, resources help accelerate transformation
Each Rimini Street client benefits from the Company’s flexible, premium-level enterprise software support model, including its industry-leading Service Level Agreement of 10-minute response times for all critical Priority 1 cases. All clients are also assigned a Primary Support Engineer with an average of 20 years’ experience in enterprise software and backed by a team of functional and technical engineers. In addition, Rimini Street can support SCEE’s current Oracle applications beyond the vendor-dictated support deadline.
“Moving to Rimini Street has freed us to improve business services, workloads and processes, and ensured we don’t have to undertake an expensive and unnecessary upgrade from an Oracle version that is perfect for our needs,” said Szabo. “Our key people can now address procurement, invoicing, or hotdesking inefficiencies and look at innovative ways to improve how we do business.”
SCEE’s team now has the additional time in the day and the budget required to focus on strategic business initiatives, including a move towards a hybrid cloud service which will enable SCEE’s multiple business units to more easily collaborate and operate. Furthermore, SCEE has received superior service whenever support tickets are raised.
“The IT department leave independent reviews for each closed support ticket and they’re almost entirely five stars,” said Szabo. “Moving to third party support wasn’t just about reducing cost, but also reducing the effort required to deal with the software vendor. Rimini Street had a great reputation for providing exceptional service while also being incredibly easy to work with, and our experiences with them so far validate that reputation.”
