Credit: Pxhere

The Home Office has appointed a UK-based third-party provider to meet its Oracle support needs for the next two years.

Newly published commercial documents reveal that, on 12 April, the department entered in an initial 24-month contract with Support Revolution. If the engagement is extended to its full potential term of four years, it will be worth £8.6m to the software support firm, which was founded in 2012 and is based in the Berkshire town of Thatcham.

According to the text of the contract, the Home Office “requirement is to replace Oracle software support with an equivalent or better support and maintenance arrangement”.

Support Revolution is thus contracted to provide the department with a “maintenance and support service… [that] shall maintain the supported software to the ensure it functions as expected”.

The contract added: “The supported software in scope of this contract underpins many services… and the [Home Office] requires the supplier to ensure high availability of services performant to the changing demands of the user base, with minimal disruption and swift service restoration, in accordance with… service levels… [and] deliver a flexible [and] responsive – yet predictable and repeatable – service provision, supporting the supported software.”

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The deal, which was awarded via the G-Cloud 12 framework, also covers the provision of incident- and problem-management services, as well as the delivery of “patches, fixes and work-arounds to correct incidents with supported software”.

Personnel provided by the supplier must possess the relevant expertise in Oracle systems, as well holding SC-level security clearance which, according to government guidance, is necessary for officials and contractors that “have long-term, frequent and uncontrolled access to ‘Secret’ assets and/or occasional, supervised access to ‘Top Secret’ assets”.

The cost of the contract is also inclusive of 150 days of consultancy services provided via Support Revolution’s Skillsbank service, which provides on-demand access to Oracle ERP consultants.

The Digital Marketplace service listing for the IT firm’s core Oracle support offering claims that it can “save organisations between 50% and 90% on their annual software maintenance charges”, when compared with vendor-provided support. The company, which also provides SAP services, also pledges “no forced upgrades” and to support systems for as long as the customer wishes.

The Home Office last year completed a project to move a wide range of core systems – including HR, payroll, finance, and employee analytics – into an Oracle cloud environment. The project formed part of the department’s Metis programme of transformation, through which it sought to transform back-office systems and drive adoption of software-as-a-service models.