Racing and Wagering WA takes a punt on Rimini Street

Racing and Wagering Western Australia (RWWA) has switched from Oracle to Rimini Street for support and advanced security for its Oracle database and technology landscape.

The RWWA signed a contract with Rimini Street through a whole-of-government-agreement, providing support for its Oracle footprint as well as implementing Rimini Street’s Advanced Database Security.

“The wagering sector is a competitive one in Australia and companies need a level of flexibility in their systems to provide new services while staying online,” Rimini Street A/NZ and Oceania group vice president and regional general manager Daniel Benad said.

“Sports wagering is now a 24/7/365 business, and clients are increasingly 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.”

The RWWA identified a need to invest in its customer engagement as well as machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to complement its journey to shift its infrastructure platform from on-premise to cloud.

“Wagering on racing and sport in general is now an anytime, anywhere offering, and we wanted to ensure that we could continue to innovate to provide the experience our customers deserve and expect,” RWWA head of technology Grey Properjohn said. 

Oracle Database and Oracle Technology platforms, while mature and reliable, were proving to be high-cost. Furthermore, 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.

“Having direct access to a dedicated, local support engineer assigned specifically to us, gave us peace of mind to operate during the most critical periods of the Melbourne Cup, knowing that any issue would be addressed quickly should one arise because they were available and nearby,” Properjohn said. 

“This is a huge weight off our shoulders as vendor support is often overseas and they don’t have the level of knowledge of our environment in the way Rimini Street’s dedicated local engineer does. That level of service and availability from Rimini Street during a high period of activity was and is greatly appreciated.”

Rimini Street has been picking up a number of customers recently adding the University of Technology Sydney to its support list.