Gartner Symposium: How Specsavers saved on Oracle costs

During the Gartner Symposium in Barcelona, retailer Specsavers took part in a session looking at how third-party support is helping the business to fund new technology initiatives.

Specsavers’ mission is to change people’s lives through better sight and hearing. For Kieran Mazur, head of technology – business applications, at Specsavers, this philosophy is instilled in everything the IT function does. 

In 2021, the retailer signed a strategic agreement with Accenture to work closely with Microsoft, to modernise its legacy IT architecture with cloud, intelligent automation and IT security improvements. The overall goal of the Accenture and Microsoft contact has been focused on driving improvements and increasing automation to reduce IT incidents and lowering the total cost of IT ownership through systems consolidation.

The company has been running an Oracle system since 2010, which underpins the company’s supply chain system. Oracle, says Mazur, is deeply embedded in the company.

But given the Accenture contract and an ambition to invest in new technology initiatives, Mazur says Specsavers found that although it was a long-term Oracle customer, its relationship with the technology provider was not the same as if it were a large enterprise customer.

“Specsavers is a 40-year-old company and a global company, but we never felt like we were that important to some of the larger vendors. The engagement feels different,” adds Mazur. 

Earlier this year, Specsavers signed a contract with third-party support provider Spinnaker to take over the maintenance of its Oracle system. Discussing the move to Spinnaker, Mazur says: “We weren’t getting the value out of Oracle maintenance contract, so we went with Spinnaker to deliver the best outcome we could achieve and divert the money saved into our transformational programme.”
 
According to Mazur, the difference in approach between an Oracle support contract, which involves self-help and access to patches, with Spinnaker’s is that “we don’t have to explain who we are and why there’s a [technical problem with Oracle] for us”.

Having convinced the people within the business that using Spinnaker for third-party support would not damage the long-term relationship with Oracle, Mazur says: “We started [the transition] by running with Spinnaker and the Oracle contract in parallel.”

Having downloaded all the Oracle patches, he says Specsavers assessed the level of support it was receiving from Oracle against Spinnaker’s support: “We started seeing faster turnarounds from Spinnaker in terms of problems where we had a patch, which could then be applied.”

Since Specsavers has remained on an Oracle perpetual software licence, Mazur says it has continued to run the Oracle systems on-premise software: “We still have the contractual rights to use the software. But what we lost is access to the patches Oracle provides and any feature enhancements.”

Mazur does not anticipate that a lack of patches will affect Specsavers. “We have taken these platforms to a place where even the vendors themselves were backing off innovation. We’ve completed a lot of the upgrades to the underlying technology, so we are confident we have the latest and greatest features that were available to us at the time.”

What has gone away, he says, is the ability to receive any more future updates, but given Oracle’s focus on building out its cloud platform for enterprise software and moving existing on-premise customers over to this, Mazur does not expect there will be “tremendous movement on very old things”.

After the pilot, Specsavers still had 90 unresolved helpdesk tickets with Oracle. He says Oracle advised Specsavers to download the latest patches. Having moved entirely over to Spinnaker, subsequent patches are unavailable, but given the maturity of the platform and the patches he now has access to, Mazur feels confident Specsavers will be able to resolve future problems with Spinnaker’s help.

Migrating to third-party support is seen as a way to lower IT costs. Mazur says: “The business is not in a place where it is cutting back on the IT budget. We are finding a way [to use the freed-up budget] for us to transform and grow.”

For Mazur, products such as the enterprise software Oracle sells is not going to make a huge difference to customers directly. Instead, the money saved from dropping Oracle maintenance is being reinvested in the online and an in-store patient journey, creating what he describes as “something new, which does not exist today”.