The Russian Railway ceased to pay technical support of Oracle

On March 21, 2017 summed up of the Russian Railway the results of purchase of certificates on functional support of software environments of Oracle announced at the end of 2016.^[1]

The Russian Railway will pay 355 million rubles for functional support of Oracle

The collective application for tender was submitted by one participant - IntelLex company (together with Bazovye Tekhnologii Ltd). The offer of these companies met requirements of a tender committee, at the same time the cost of the agreement was estimated at 355 million rubles - 17.5% lower than the starting price of the contract (430 million rubles). The agreement will be signed at the price which is not exceeding the proposal of the participant.

Within purchase the customer is going to get functional support of software products of Oracle, such as Oracle Database, Internet Application Server, Partitioning, Data Mining WebLogic Server and so forth within 5 years. In addition, the contractor had to carry out complex technical audit of the used software and also provide optimization and development of the existing IT systems based on software of Oracle.

The announced competition does not provide acquisition of technical support at Oracle, but provides acquisition of functional support of software environments of the corporate information systems (CIS) using software of Oracle, - the Chief information officer of the Russian Railway Evgeny Charkin told TAdviser. - Such format of the tender is caused by results of the carried-out GVTs of the analysis which showed that more than 90% of the used software of Oracle have versions which the Oracle company does not support any more or stops technical support in 2016.

According to Charkin, at the same time, specialists of GVTs, on the basis of historical data of support, defined necessary aspects and organizational requirements to support of the software environments using software of Oracle. These aspects and requirements were completely reflected in terms of reference as a part of the tender documentation. At the same time, the initial cost of the certificate of functional support of software environments specified in the tender documentation was created as a result of the conducted surveys among the participants of IT market capable to provide the support level necessary for the Russian Railway.

Due to a large number of different tasks of solvable CIS of the Russian Railway, works on the analysis and the choice of solutions for replacement of software of Oracle are not finished yet. As for the purposes of such transition, i.e., first of all, ensuring technology security and reduction of cost of ownership, these goals we already achieve, having passed to the functional support of software environments given by alternative suppliers, - the Chief information officer of the Russian Railway added.

In 2016 suppliers of licenses and certificates of technical support of Oracle for the Russian Railway were the companies "Corus Consulting" and "Croc" (total amount of contracts about 106 million rubles). In 2015 Oracle provided technical support services "Swagger" for 77.8 million rubles.

Notes