Total cost of Oracle Cloud implementation: FOI release

Information requested

Please provide the total cost of Oracle Cloud implementation. To be specific this should include total programme costs, staff costs, contractor costs, from 2020 - 2025, cost of licenses, cost on third parties including systems integrator, support partner and client side partner. This should include all phases of the programme if there was more than 1.

Please provide the total indicative yearly forecast to the Scottish Government for running Oracle Cloud for the next 5 financial years (if you are unable to provide a 5 year forecast you should provide the forecast for as long as it is available) this should include staffing costs, license costs, support costs, future development costs (in general all costs incurred by the Scottish Government to run and operate Oracle Cloud)

Lastly please provide the total running cost for the equivalent EHR, PECOS and SEAs systems between the years of 2020 - 2024 to be specific this should also include staffing costs, license costs, support costs, development costs (in general all costs associated with the running of these platforms) and broken down into financial years.

Response

• In response to your first question, all of the information you have requested was previously published as part of the 6 monthly PAC update which can be found through the following link - Major IT Projects Report SG to PAC 21 May 2025. Under section 25(1) of FOISA, we do not have to give you information which is already reasonably accessible to you. If, however, you do not have internet access to obtain this information from the website(s) listed, then please contact me again and I will send you a paper copy.
• In response to your second question, under section 17(b) of FOISA, the indicative annual forecast for running Oracle Cloud for the year 2025-2026 is not available. We have not yet completed one business-as-usual year of the platform and are in a state of stabilisation, hence costs have not yet settled into a regular pattern. Costs for financial year 2025-2026 so far are therefore not representative of the expected business as usual delivery costs of the platform, with both support and licence usage subject to fluctuation as we normalise our operating model and our usage. In addition, costs associated with support from our external provider will reduce over this inaugural year, therefore any figure offered now would not be an accurate representation of the final 2025-2026 figure. Optimisations, automations and further deployment of Oracle digital assistants etc will further help reduce run cost. As we do not have a figure for 2025- 2026 we are unable to provide an accurate forecast for future years.
• In response to your third question, the table below illustrates what we have typically spent from 2020 – 2024 on eHR, PECOS and SEAS including staffing costs, license costs, support costs and development costs.

YR1	YR2	YR3	YR4	YR1-4 TOTAL
2020 - 2021	2021 - 2022	2022-23	2023-24	2020 - 2024
£13,217,733.68	£13,199,762.64	£14,195,163.84	£12,685,947.65	£53,298,607.81

Making this kind of comparison of running costs - between three legacy on-premise systems with a new Software as a Service (SaaS) - is not comparing like-with-like given the way on premise and Cloud technology differs.

• one requires project-based upgrades every few years while the other is subject to a regular cadence of updates and enhancements needing careful and dedicated ongoing maintenance
• for example, SEAS was upgraded once every 4 years and was predominantly upgraded by external contractors, whereas Oracle Cloud is updated every 3 months with regular monthly patches also applied
• Oracle Cloud imposes an industry-standard set of financial controls across the Scottish Government and its customers
• SEAS was a finance-only system, e-HR was an HR-only system and PECOS manages purchase to pay functionality compared to Oracle which is an integrated Finance, HR, and Purchasing system
• PECOS remains as a platform for those public sector customers not migrated over onto Oracle, unlike SEAS and e-HR which are now legacy systems.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.