Rimini Street has announced the University of Melbourne, has engaged Rimini Street to enable greater digital innovation investments for its organisation consisting of 55,000 students and 10,000 staff.

By selecting Rimini Support, Rimini Connect and Rimini Protect for its Oracle Database, EBS and Hyperion systems, the University has eliminated the need to undertake costly, frequent upgrades without a strong ROI while gaining flexibility to innovate around its core systems.

The strategic move supports the academic institute’s continuous commitment to delivering an exceptional student experience.

“Today’s students expect to be online, whether that’s curriculums or access to resources,” said Daniel Buttigieg, director of enterprise technology at the University of Melbourne.

“The savings we’re achieving by moving to Rimini Street are enabling us to reinvest and refocus on developing new digital solutions and enhancing online access for our users.” Buttigieg said.

Custom Oracle Environment Secures Improved Support and Risk Reduction with Rimini Street

Overseeing the University’s enterprise systems and services, from data centres and networks to ERP and CRM systems, Buttigieg’s remit includes the University’s ERP systems that underpin the back-office activities of financial, HR and payroll transactions, including 300 plus customisations.

With Oracle’s vendor support, which does not include support for these customisations, the University experienced lags in responsiveness which sometimes led to tickets sitting in queue for months without being addressed.

“Before Rimini Street, in order for us to remain supported by the vendor, we had to continually upgrade on their timeline just so when we put in a ticket, they don’t come back to us and say, ‘Sorry, but you’re not on a version we support anymore,” said Buttigieg.

“We were stuck in a perpetual cycle of upgrades, each one taking months of preparation, testing and deployment,”

“The risks were equally high. If an upgrade or security patching goes wrong, we could lose access to things like our ERP or identity management system, which can be catastrophic for an organisation of our size and the number of staff and students that we have.”

“We weren’t seeing an investment in the platform that was appropriate to the size of the support cost that we were paying,” Buttigieg said

So, by moving over to Rimini Street and not getting access to those newer releases really wasn’t impacting us because we weren’t seeing the value of that investment through our support costs.” he said.

End-to-end Software Support and Services Enable Accelerated Digital Innovation Without the Disruption

By switching to Rimini Street, Buttigieg says they no longer worry about support for their core systems or having to dedicate funds and team focus on unnecessary upgrade activities.

Confident in the value and quality of services provided by Rimini Street, the University added Rimini Connect for Email to ensure ongoing compatibility with email servers and take advantage of the latest security protocols.

“Rimini Support keeps our systems running smoothly, Rimini Protect offers us proactive protection against threats and vulnerabilities, and Rimini Connect extends the life of our existing release. This is all without having to perform another upgrade,” said Buttigieg.

University of Melbourne is proving that a smarter IT strategy doesn’t just save money – it opens new opportunities for innovation and growth.

According to Rimini Street’s vice president, industry team and retail solutions Dion Rooney the education industry is highly competitive, and staying on the forefront of innovation requires investment of people, time and money.

“We’ve helped many higher learning institutes across Australia, New Zealand and abroad, accelerate their timeline to executing their vision simply by providing better support and the ability to optimise and redirect their resources towards modernisation and strategic initiatives,”

Now that’s a smart move that both the school and students can equally benefit from.” said Rooney

Meanwhile Rimini Street has expanded its enterprise IT services portfolio, offering a comprehensive range of support, managed services, integration, security, and observability solutions.

The portfolio also includes Rimini ONE™, an end-to-end outsourcing model for systems like SAP, Oracle, and VMware, meeting growing demand for more responsive, cost-effective alternatives to traditional enterprise software support.