Third-party support and security enable UTS to slash support wait times

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 the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has switched maintenance, support and security management of its Oracle database and technology platforms from Oracle to Rimini Street. In doing so, the University has slashed wait times for support requests and improved service quality on its Oracle system. Rimini Street is also helping the University manage the ongoing IT skills shortage and rapid transition to hybrid learning, while providing security for its database and advanced application middleware.

“UTS, like all universities in Australia, has had to rapidly transition to an almost exclusive online service delivery. Budgets are tightening across the board, but the quality-of-service delivery expectations remain the same or higher,” said Daniel Benad, group vice president and regional general manager, Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, Rimini Street. “Students can now log into their online classes from almost anywhere in the world which adds a new layer to what is required from the IT team. Fast, reliable, and secure systems are needed to keep up with the changing world.”

Focusing on the big issues with more time and money to spare

UTS is one of Australia’s leading universities, with circa 45,000 students, 3,500 staff and 7,000 researchers (either PhD candidates or post-doctoral researchers). The IT department alone employs around 300 staff and is responsible for the digital experiences supporting the people, processes, and culture at the university. The University faced challenges during the pandemic including a massive shift to online learning and remote work, and a growing IT skills shortage. The large decline in the number of international students enrolling in Australia has also seen IT budgets shrink. Because of these limitations, UTS needed to refocus its strategic resources more efficiently.

In addition, maintaining their Oracle database was leading to the draining of IT budget and internal resources. Support tickets were often slow to be resolved by the vendor, preventing IT staff from completing valuable system upgrades or responding quickly to new challenges. Staff were preoccupied with keeping systems afloat in a rapidly scaling up environment and had little time to focus on growth.

“Skilled staff are only getting more expensive to hire and retaining these employees just to work on minor projects and simple upgrades is no longer sustainable,” said Brian Kelly, Head of IT Operations at UTS. “We’ve had to really maximize the resources we have to keep our IT services growing and improving.”

In addition, as UTS increasingly moved towards a more hybrid learning and working environment, cost capability, supportability, and flexibility are key to guaranteeing robust and reliable IT services. The rapid move into the hybrid workspace also opened new avenues for cybersecurity attacks or breaches. As the number and location of users increased, so too did opportunities for access. As such, the University was conscious it needed to increase the security of its Oracle system, particularly as routine patching was a time-consuming endeavour for its IT team.

“UTS is relatively new to the hybrid working and learning space, and it’s important to be mindful of risks from such a rapid transformation,” said Kelly. “We had to undergo numerous lengthy upgrades to keep our system secure from known flaws.”

The University began to look at ways to lower the cost and resources drain on its IT team and turned to Rimini Street’s third-party support and maintenance.

Lowering Costs and Response Times

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 the client’s enterprise software and backed by a team of functional and technical engineers.

In addition, Rimini Street’s Database Management Services provide UTS with new expert skills from skilled and responsive engineers. Since partnering with Rimini Street, resolving support tickets is easier and quicker, with expert engineers available to respond to challenges at any time.

“Being able to shrink how much time is spent on routine work has really allowed us to prioritize the bigger picture, and Rimini Street gives us time back in our day,” said Kelly. “The team is no longer worried about how long a patch or upgrade will take, how long it’ll take to get issues resolved, or how many hours they’ll have to dedicate to something routine. Rimini Street has taken care of that for us and having such a quick turnaround for support has really eased up our workload.”

“Rimini Street gives us high-quality support for these business-as-usual activities without breaking our budget. Being able to be flexible with what senior ICT staff we hire means we’re putting a microscope on what our team needs, rather than allowing necessity to dictate it.”.

Hybrid ERP System Now Proactively Secured

Having the time and resource availability enabled UTS to develop its own security upgrades. Further, Rimini Street’s security offering gave UTS peace of mind that it would be supported and remain live while it underwent these upgrades.

“With time and budget to spare we’re now looking at developing security further with a cloud-first strategy,” said Kelly. “We’ve also completed some other security projects, including secure identity management and access controls. We’re also working on automating service management, migrating to the cloud, anything that improves the quality of user experience.”

“UTS is yet another example of an institution that has benefited from Rimini Street’s comprehensive and effective database support,” said Benad. “As international borders continue to open and students choose Australia as an education destination, this streamlined support and improved service delivery will play a huge part in improving their learning experience.”

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