Naysayers, be off with you: Oracle Cloud does indeed have takers, and one of them is Brent Council, a local authority that forms one of London’s 32 boroughs.
The council’s Oracle E-Business Suite is currently hosted in-house and is no longer a supported version; as a result the council has allocated £1.4 million for a Systems Integrator to help it move to Oracle’s Cloud within 18 months.
Brent Council had joined the OneOracle project in 2012; a joint licensing agreement with seven London boroughs that ended in 2018. The council brought the software platform back in-house and has since hosted it on-premises. And it’s making a leap that many are pondering.
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In a contract notice Brent Council says it “wishes to establish a programme that will include the provision of SI support to migrate from existing finance, procurement and HR/Payroll systems to a single Oracle Cloud solution.”
The Council wants the new system in place and operational by July 2021, it also wants this to be done by a single supplier. The latest start date is the 20 of April this year and the budget for the project is “up to £1.4 million.”
The successful candidate will be able to “demonstrate experience in designing, configuring and migrating to the new Oracle Cloud for Finance, Procurement, HR and Payroll within the public sector from an existing EBS R12 solution.”
The council notes that its current system is limited as a lot of the approval processes still remain off-system, such as bank reconciliations; AP processing and AR debt recovery. Moving to the cloud they hope to bring these services online, as well as migrating the existing finance, procurement and payroll systems to Oracle’s cloud infrastructure.
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It’s not the only choice: some 73 percent of Oracle customers moving to cloud environments are choosing alternative cloud providers instead, a Rimini Street survey suggested in 2019.
In findings contested by Oracle, Rimini Street claimed: “Oracle customers are seeing a disconnect between the realities of running IT environments day to day and the ever-increasing demands for their business teams to roll out game-changing innovation.
“While the executive team lays out priorities for fueling growth and improving competitive advantage, IT is all too often committed to a vendor technology stack and roadmap that ties up their people, funds and processes.”
It added: “Oracle’s proposed fix for these problems is to migrate customers to the Oracle Cloud. However, according to our research, most licensee respondents are either not choosing to migrate to the cloud at all, or they are migrating but not choosing Oracle Cloud. Reasons cited include cost, business disruption and lack of a business case.”
