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Suffolk County Council Oracle E-Business Suite Managed Services Case Study
Claremont (now DSP) ensured an uninterrupted transition to a new Finance and HR Oracle EBS Managed Service for Suffolk County Council
Oracle E-Business Suite
Managed Services
Overview
Suffolk County Council (SCC) is the administrative authority for the county of Suffolk in East England. The council supports approximately 750,000 residents in education, care, culture, leisure, public safety and transport.
SCC is a long-term user of Oracle technology, with established and mature databases supporting many of its critical systems. However, in the last ten years, the public sector has been subject to demanding budget cuts. As a result, SCC faced significant challenges in supporting critical services to the local community. Clearly, under-supported systems required a Managed Services approach and technical support from an experienced external provider. To this day, Claremont (now DSP) still manages essential services. Within the last year, our project has simplified an over-engineered and complicated architecture, unpicking layers of complexity and upgrading out-of-date technology. This solution has proved to be more cost-effective for the council.
"It’s an absolute credit to Claremont’s (now DSP) ethos that support has continued in such a professional way."
Suffolk County Council
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SCC's Oracle infrastructure was highly complex, requiring specialised support. Along with Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), over 50 Oracle databases underpinned critical applications. These not only supported Finance and HR, but they also supported nearly 5,000 students of the University of Suffolk and Highways Management. However, maintaining a highly qualified in-house IT team continued to present challenges, resulting in the Council deciding to outsource the support needed from an experienced Oracle specialist who could work with critical live environments and provide a stable Finance and HR managed service solution.
During the first few weeks, Claremont (now DSP) took a flexible approach to the engagement and transition process, fast-tracking certain aspects to ensure instant support under challenging circumstances. Understanding the urgent nature of the project, the team swiftly provided the necessary technical support to maintain the continuity of critical databases.
A phased “ramp-up” and pragmatic approach meant that the Council and our staff could work together and ensure essential services supporting the people of Suffolk remained uninterrupted. Throughout the following year, an experienced team of Oracle Database Administrators (DBAs) began to analyse the existing Oracle infrastructure and identify ways in which it might perform even more efficiently.
During the onboarding period, SCC was also urgently required to complete an Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade to optimise the database. Claremont (now DSP) successfully worked with the Council enabling them to manage and complete the upgrade, a project which had to run in parallel to onboarding.
For the last two years, our team of DBAs have continued supporting the Council’s critical systems through the HR and Finance managed service, attaining over 99% compliance with the service level agreements (SLA), including an SLA for incident resolution.
Within the last year, a project has also simplified the over-engineered and complicated Oracle architecture, unpicking layers of complexity and upgrading out-of-date technology. One of the critical aspects of this project involved migrating approximately 50 databases; both live and test environments, off Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) and onto single-node instances.
While Oracle RAC has its place in ensuring high availability, it had become unnecessarily complex for SCC and needed to be simplified. As a result, Claremont (now DSP) provided SCC with a more efficient and cost-effective Oracle infrastructure while enhancing flexibility and scalability.
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