UK Home Office signs up for £54 million in Oracle cloud • The Register
The UK’s Home Office has signed a new deal with Oracle for around £54 million ($72 million) in cloud infrastructure and platform services as it gears up as the centerpiece of a government shared services strategy based on Big Red.
In the form of a license subscription notification, the Whitehall department responsible for policing, immigration, and passports struck the contract from a pre-agreed framework deal for back-office software, which is worth a maximum of £5 billion ($6.7 billion) to all vendors signed up.
Over five years, the call-off contract for Oracle is worth £53.55 million ($72 million) for cloud services. It is set to start next month and will end in 2030.
As part of the deal, Oracle will provide a portal updating the service availability for cloud services and other information, according to the published contract. Other details of the contract are heavily redacted. The Home Office has long been wedded to Oracle both in terms of business applications and data warehousing. Until 2021, it relied on Oracle E-Business Suite to support nearly 30,000 users. Later that year, it celebrated its migration to the Oracle Fusion suite of applications built on the Oracle Cloud Platform, hence the need for PaaS and IaaS deals with Big Red. Along with a group of six other departments, its Oracle estate was supported by SSCL, a former joint venture now wholly owned by French outsourcing giant Sopra Steria.
The Home Office’s move to Fusion indicated a direction of travel for a group of central government departments brought together under the Shared Services Strategy [PDF] launched in 2021. In September last year, IBM and Oracle won a competition to supply an ERP upgrade to a group of government departments in a deal worth £711 million ($950 million). Under the so-called Synergy Program, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) will lead the Ministry of Justice (MoJ), the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), and the Home Office in the transfer to one ERP and HR system with a common set of processes.
“The prime driver of the Synergy Program is to drive significant business transformation across the… departments,” DWP said at the time.
The plan is to work with suppliers to jointly develop a new Common Operating Model (COM) and introduce a new “user-centric service including common data standards.”
With the Home Office already on Fusion, other departments remain on Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2.6, which has recently been migrated from on-prem to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Earlier this year, the DWP modified a 12-year-old contract with Sopra Steria, tacking on more than £100 million ($134 million) to allow it to run legacy systems for another three years, after a delay to a replacement ERP and HR software project.
Synergy is one of a number of central government ERP and shared service projects designed to create greater alignment in infrastructure, applications, and processes set to cost around £2.5 billion (c $3.3 billion) in total. ®
