BreastScreen Victoria to use third-party support for Oracle database

Australia’s BreastScreen Victoria has inked a support contract with Rimini Street for its Oracle Database software, freeing IT capacity and funds to focus on strategic initiatives such as a datacentre migration project.

Funded by state and federal governments, the non-profit organisation provides free mammograms to eligible women in the state of Victoria. It performed more than 230,000 breast screens in the last financial year from 43 screening clinics and two mobile service units.

It uses its own software, which is built on top of the Oracle Database platform, to manage its operations ranging from booking screenings to maintaining clinical records.

“Our Oracle Database is a very stable platform that works incredibly well for us to this day, and we expect it will continue to work well into the future,” said Georgina Marr, director of IT services at BreastScreen Victoria.

However, because their existing support was not situated locally, response times and ticket logging were delayed, forcing their internal IT staff to troubleshoot the issues themselves.

Marr wanted to free up the IT team from these time-consuming issues and enable them to focus on more valuable tasks, leading BreastScreen Victoria to turn to Rimini Street, a third-party supplier of support services for enterprise software.

“It’s common for an organisation’s internal IT team to want to undertake all the issues for its environment, but we wanted to free up our team to assist with more valuable tasks,” Marr said.

“The financial savings were just one factor in our decision to move to Rimini Street. As a result of our partnership with Rimini Street, we’ve been able to focus on more high-value work including big projects to improve our service to clients without expanding the team.”

Darren Firth, IT operations manager at BreastScreen Victoria, said having a primary support engineer based locally in Australia and available on demand has taken a “huge weight off our shoulders”.

“Rimini Street is an extension of our IT team, with knowledge of our IT environment that enables them to dive into an issue and address it immediately. Knowing that their local Oracle database support team is backed by Rimini Street engineers globally brings us additional confidence and peace of mind,” he added.

In February 2020, the Australian government also inked a sourcing agreement with Rimini Street to make it easier and cheaper for government agencies to access third-party support for major software products.

Randall Brugeaud, former CEO of Australia’s Digital Transformation Agency, said at the time that the agreement with Rimini Street was part of efforts to “expand whole-of-government volume sourcing agreements to ensure that agencies have ready access to the best pricing, terms and conditions that leverage the buying power of government”.

According to Gartner, the third-party enterprise software support market is expected to grow from $351m in 2019 to $1.05bn by 2023 as more businesses look to control costs while enabling digital business growth.

However, third-party support providers do not have access to proprietary software code from the original supplier, including software patches. That said, they do offer other support activities that can help IT organisations with workarounds and custom code fixes, especially for legacy systems.