Mark Smith, CEO of Support Revolution, highlights the plight of
public sector IT amid budget cuts and explains why it is vital to
deliver better sourced services.
A key IT cost for the public sector is software support and maintenance from large ERP vendors such as Oracle and SAP. In 2013 alone, the UK Government spent approximately £290m on Oracle; a cost which is exacerbated by the fact there are so many versions of the software and various support levels and costs.
In 2015, The Cabinet Office
became concerned with how much was being spent on these types of
software and formally asked various agencies to look at alternatives to Oracle in a bid to slash public spending.
Support
costs typically make-up 22% of a customer’s license costs for the first
5 years and can be significantly more once the product being supported
is out of this period. This cost is a heavy burden which many public
sector departments needlessly pay as ever more demanding day-to-day
pressures reduce the time to research, source and implement better value
long-term solutions that deliver the same day-to-day quality-of-work
but with a significantly lower cost.
Third-party support providers
exist to allow organisations who run Oracle and SAP services to receive
best-in-class software support and maintenance from a team of experts
and are able to ensure every customer can save at least 50% on support
costs.
Another significant issue facing the public sector and
impacting IT support budgets are software upgrade cycles. Yet, the
public sector purse has never faced tighter rein and regular updates to
implement the latest version of each system are more unlikely today than
at any other time. Third-party support is able to remove the
organisation from that mandatory upgrade cycle and provide support for
older versions of software that vendors no longer support.
Within an article by TheRegister.co.uk
in August 2016, an unnamed government insider said: “The spend controls
sound a mess – there is more getting through but also arbitrary
challenges. The problem is it sounds like those running the controls
don’t have enough tech knowledge but are following tick lists, which is
only further irritating departments.”
Adjacent Open Access, 5th April 2017