Racing and Wagering Western Australia (RWWA), a controlling authority for thoroughbred, harness and greyhound racing in the state, has announced it is planning to reduce its reliance on Oracle, prepare for open-source databases and improve security, partnering with Rimini Street, a provider of enterprise software products and services and third-party support for Oracle and SAP software products.

The move is expected to help RWWA achieve its strategic plan and advance security for its Oracle database and Oracle technology landscape while reducing reliance on Oracle products such as cloud-native and open-source offerings, which were seen as “viable for the organisation”.

The new partnership is also expected to offer RWWA more deployment and usage flexibility, reduce enterprise software operating expenses and improve security.

Daniel Benad, group vice president and regional general manager, Australia, New Zealand and Oceania, Rimini Street, stressed that sports wagering now required a “24/7/365 business”, with clients turning to organisations that offer the best ‘always on’ experience during big events.

“To do that, wagering companies can’t afford to spend their limited IT budget solely on enterprise software operating costs; they need to be able to invest more of their IT budget in innovation and continuously update their offerings to stay ahead of their competition,” he said.

With the pandemic having shifted businesses from retail brick-and-mortar outlets to managing online wagering, the RWWA said it made a decision to invest in its customer engagement as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

The RWWA also decided to shift its infrastructure platform from on-premise to cloud, a transformation that is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Oracle database and Oracle technology platforms, while mature and reliable, were proving to be high-cost and security patches offered by Oracle for its platforms were time-consuming, resource-intensive, costly to implement and often did not fix the root cause of security issues, the firm said.

RWWA signed a contract with Rimini Street through Australia’s Whole of Government Agreement, with the company providing support for RWWA’s Oracle footprint.

Following this, RWWA also selected and implemented Rimini Street’s Advanced Database Security, which promises RWWA a security solution with a fast time-to-protect its database versus Oracle’s “traditional, dated software vendor patching approach”.

According to RWWA, software vendor patching was often ineffective due to late delivery, complexity to apply code patches, and the expense of extensive regression testing before moving patches into production environments while Rimini Street’s security solution protected databases from known and unknown vulnerabilities by monitoring and analysing database communications traffic and blocking attempted attacks before they reach the database.

Also, Rimini Street’s service level agreement offered 10-minute response times for all critical Priority 1 cases and will be assigned a primary support engineer, which was critical to RWWA during the organisation’s busiest periods, such as during the annual Melbourne Cup – a period which sees huge increases in traffic to wagering platforms across the country.