Executive Summary
A pan-European commercial bank operating across seven countries, with Oracle Database and E-Business Suite at the core of its treasury, trade finance, and corporate banking operations, was paying £2.05 million annually in Oracle support fees. The bank had been an Oracle support customer for eleven years. In that time, Oracle's annual support escalation clauses had increased the cost by 34% from the original contract value — with no corresponding improvement in service quality or responsiveness.
Following a strategic review of IT expenditure as part of a cost transformation programme, the bank's IT procurement and finance leadership engaged GoVendorFree to assess the third-party support option. The assessment concluded that 68% savings were achievable without any change to the bank's Oracle infrastructure, without abandoning its Oracle licences, and without compromising the regulatory documentation requirements of the PRA and FCA.
The transition was completed in six weeks. Twelve months after go-live, the bank had saved £1.4 million and reported no reduction in Oracle support quality — and in several instances, measurably better response times than Oracle's own support had delivered.
The Challenge: Oracle's Support Model Was Designed for Oracle's Benefit
The bank's IT director described Oracle's support contract in terms that most enterprise Oracle customers will recognise: "We were paying a premium price for a tiered support system that routed our Priority 1 incidents through offshore call centres before they reached an engineer who actually understood Oracle Database internals. The Annual Support Update had become a ritual escalation — Oracle's price went up, we complained, they offered a token concession, and we accepted because we couldn't see an alternative."
Three specific pain points drove the decision to explore alternatives seriously:
- Oracle's Sustaining Engineering model had effectively ended proactive bug-fix releases for the Oracle E-Business Suite version the bank was running. Issues were being deferred to upgrade-dependent fixes — which the bank was not ready to execute.
- Oracle's support portal had introduced new self-service requirements that increased the time between incident logging and engineer engagement for non-critical issues from hours to days.
- Oracle's renewal team began applying pressure to migrate to Oracle Fusion Cloud — a migration the bank's transformation programme was not scheduled to evaluate for at least three years.
The combination of price escalation, deteriorating responsiveness, and renewal-pressure tactics led the bank's Group CIO to approve an external assessment of third-party support options.
Key insight: Oracle's Sustaining Engineering support tier — which applies to Oracle Database releases that have exited Premier Support — provides no new bug fixes, no new security patches, and no new regulatory compliance updates. Organisations in Sustaining Engineering are effectively paying full Oracle support fees for an diminishing service. Many GoVendorFree clients in financial services have found that independent support delivers better coverage than Oracle's own Sustaining Engineering tier at 32% of the cost.
The GoVendorFree Assessment
GoVendorFree's assessment process began with a technical inventory of the bank's Oracle environment — covering Oracle Database versions, Oracle E-Business Suite modules in active use, all Oracle product licences including Java SE, and the specific known issues and customisations that the bank's internal Oracle support team managed on a day-to-day basis.
The assessment identified three distinct components of the bank's Oracle footprint that required different treatment:
- Oracle Database (11g and 19c): Both versions in active use across production and disaster recovery environments. Oracle Database 11g was in Sustaining Engineering — GoVendorFree would provide equivalent or better coverage at 32% of Oracle's contracted rate. Oracle Database 19c remained in Premier Support — GoVendorFree's coverage model would match Oracle's service level at 52% of cost.
- Oracle E-Business Suite R12.1.3: The bank's EBS implementation carried 340 customisations documented over a decade of operation. GoVendorFree's assessment confirmed that its engineering team had specific EBS R12.1.3 experience relevant to the bank's finance, treasury, and procurement modules.
- Oracle Java SE: The bank's Java estate had been subject to Oracle's 2023 per-employee pricing change, adding £180,000 to the annual Oracle invoice. GoVendorFree assessed that the bank could migrate to OpenJDK-based distributions within eight weeks, eliminating this cost entirely.
The Transition
The bank's transition to GoVendorFree support was executed over six weeks, running in parallel with Oracle's active support contract to ensure no gap in coverage. GoVendorFree's transition methodology for financial services clients includes five phases: discovery, documentation, parallel operation, handover review, and go-live sign-off.
Discovery produced a complete Oracle estate inventory including version documentation, active support tickets, known open issues, patch history, and customisation register. This documentation had value beyond the transition itself — the bank's internal teams described it as the most complete Oracle estate documentation they had possessed in years.
The parallel operation phase ran for three weeks, with GoVendorFree engineers receiving copies of all Oracle support interactions and independently assessing response quality and resolution timelines. During parallel operation, GoVendorFree identified two outstanding Oracle tickets — one open for seven months — that GoVendorFree's team resolved within its first two weeks of access.
Regulatory Compliance
For a regulated financial institution, third-party support is not a purely commercial decision. The bank's Group Chief Risk Officer and General Counsel were involved in the assessment from the outset. GoVendorFree's engagement with the bank's compliance and legal teams covered three specific regulatory dimensions:
- PRA Supervisory Statement SS2/21 (Outsourcing and Third-Party Risk): GoVendorFree provided full documentation supporting the bank's third-party risk assessment, including SLA commitments, business continuity provisions, data handling agreements, and audit rights provisions compliant with PRA requirements.
- DORA (Digital Operational Resilience Act): GoVendorFree's service agreement was structured to meet DORA's third-party service provider requirements, including the contractual provisions required under Article 30 for ICT third-party service providers.
- FCA SYSC 8 (Outsourcing): GoVendorFree's standard financial services contract includes the access, audit, and continuity provisions required by FCA SYSC 8 — reviewed and accepted without amendment by the bank's legal team.
The regulatory due diligence process for third-party Oracle support was more straightforward than I expected. GoVendorFree arrived with documentation that specifically addressed PRA and DORA requirements — they had clearly done this before with regulated institutions. Our legal team reviewed the contract, made two minor amendments, and signed off. The saving was significant enough that we ran the numbers three times before approving it.
Group Chief Risk Officer · Pan-European Commercial Bank · Anonymised for confidentiality
Results: Twelve Months After Transition
The bank completed its first full year of GoVendorFree support in Q4 2025. The financial and operational outcomes exceeded the original assessment projections:
- Total Oracle-related support cost reduced from £2.05m to £656,000 — a 68% reduction and £1.394m annual saving.
- Average Priority 1 incident response time: 9 minutes (GoVendorFree) versus 47 minutes (Oracle, prior year average).
- Three outstanding Oracle issues inherited at transition were resolved within 30 days of go-live, including the seven-month-old EBS R12 performance issue.
- Oracle Java SE eliminated entirely: migration to Amazon Corretto completed in Week 8, removing £180,000 from the annual licence cost.
- Zero PRA, FCA, or internal audit findings related to the third-party support transition.
- Oracle renewal pressure removed: the bank's relationship with Oracle is now purely a licence management discussion, not a support dependency.
The Broader Lesson
This case illustrates a pattern GoVendorFree sees consistently across financial services clients: Oracle's support model has deteriorated significantly for organisations running stable, mature Oracle environments. The combination of Sustaining Engineering limitations, offshore first-line support, portal-driven self-service, and annual escalation pricing means that organisations paying Oracle's support fees are no longer receiving Oracle's best engineering capability.
Independent support is not a compromise for financially distressed organisations. It is the rational response to a vendor support model that is optimised for upgrade sales rather than operational excellence. The bank's experience — best-in-class response times, full regulatory documentation, and 68% cost reduction — is representative, not exceptional.
If your organisation runs Oracle Database, E-Business Suite, or Oracle Java and is paying Oracle's standard support rates, the question is not whether independent support is viable. The question is why you haven't moved already. Contact GoVendorFree to find out what your organisation's saving would be.