Roche Pharmaceuticals: $1.5M in Savings by Replacing Siebel Support with a Third-Party Alternative

Background: Why Roche Was Overpaying for Siebel Support

Roche Pharmaceuticals, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies, had been running Oracle Siebel CRM for over a decade as its primary commercial operations platform. The system managed sales force automation, customer interactions, and key account management across multiple business units. Siebel had been heavily customised and deeply integrated into Roche's clinical and commercial workflows — which meant migration off the platform was neither imminent nor commercially rational.

Despite the absence of any migration plan, Oracle continued billing Roche at the standard annual software maintenance rate of 22 percent of the original licence fee — a figure that had compounded over the years as licence entitlements expanded. The actual support Oracle was delivering — primarily access to patch bundles and a generic support portal — bore no relationship to the fee being charged. Siebel had entered a long-term maintenance phase: no significant new development was occurring, no major patches were being released, and Roche's specific Siebel version had been on Oracle's Extended Support schedule for some time.

Roche's IT leadership identified Siebel support as a candidate for cost reduction during an annual software spend review. The challenge was that Oracle's position was absolute: support pricing is non-negotiable, and any reduction to the support line would require a commitment to Oracle cloud products. This is a standard Oracle commercial tactic — using incumbent support fees as a lever to force cloud adoption conversations — and one that Roche had no strategic interest in engaging with at that time.

The Third-Party Support Landscape

Third-party support for Oracle software has been a well-established market for over fifteen years. The two primary global providers are Rimini Street and Spinnaker Support, both of whom have supported Oracle Siebel CRM customers at significant scale. The core commercial proposition is straightforward: these providers deliver comparable or superior support responsiveness at fees typically 50 to 60 percent below Oracle's standard annual maintenance rate.

For an organisation like Roche, however, the evaluation is considerably more complex than a simple cost comparison. Pharmaceutical companies operating under FDA and EMA oversight must maintain validated computer systems under GxP (Good Practice) frameworks, which encompass documentation requirements, change control obligations, audit trail integrity, and the ability to demonstrate regulatory compliance during inspections. Any support provider working on Siebel in a GxP-regulated environment must understand these obligations and operate within the organisation's validation framework.

What Third-Party Support Actually Provides

Contrary to a common misconception, third-party support providers do not access Oracle's proprietary patch repositories or reverse-engineer Oracle's software. Instead, they deliver support through a combination of bespoke fix development (writing patches specifically for the customer's environment and version), expert-led incident management using deep product knowledge, security vulnerability analysis, and regulatory support for compliance obligations. For a legacy system like Siebel — which has not received substantive new Oracle patches in years — this model is often more relevant to actual operational needs than Oracle's patch-centric support framework.

From a contractual and licensing standpoint, switching to third-party support does not require returning or modifying Oracle licences. The perpetual Siebel licences remain fully valid and owned by Roche. Oracle's standard agreement prevents an organisation from using third-party support while retaining Oracle support entitlements, so the transition involves terminating Oracle support at renewal — a clean exit with no residual obligation provided proper notice procedures are followed.

Redress Compliance's Approach: Due Diligence First

Roche engaged Redress Compliance to provide independent advisory support across three workstreams: commercial assessment, technical and regulatory due diligence on third-party providers, and transition management. This reflects the Redress model of operating exclusively on the buyer side — we have no commercial relationship with any support provider and no incentive to steer clients toward any particular vendor.

Commercial Assessment

The first phase was a precise quantification of Roche's annual Oracle Siebel support spend — broken down by licence category, business unit, and agreement line item. Siebel support often contains complexity: different versions of Siebel modules (CRM, Order Management, Call Centre) may have been licensed at different times and at different original fee levels, generating a support line that does not clearly reflect current usage. Redress normalised this into a clean baseline from which to project three-year savings scenarios under alternative support arrangements.

The analysis demonstrated a potential saving of $500,000 per year — over $1.5 million across the initial three-year contract term with a third-party provider — at service levels materially equivalent to or exceeding Oracle's offering in the areas that mattered to Roche: incident response time, dedicated account management, and validation documentation support.

Technical and Regulatory Due Diligence

This workstream was the most critical element of the engagement. Roche's Siebel deployment supported commercial operations in regulated markets, meaning the due diligence had to address not just technical capability but the provider's understanding of, and documented approach to, GxP-regulated system support. Redress evaluated both Rimini Street and Spinnaker Support against a structured framework covering the following dimensions.

First, incident management capability: the providers' ability to address Siebel-specific issues at the system level, including interoperability with Roche's surrounding technology stack (SAP, other Oracle components, integration middleware). Second, security vulnerability management: the approach to monitoring and remediating CVEs affecting the Siebel version in Roche's environment, given that Oracle's patch pipeline was no longer active for that release. Third, validation support: the providers' documentation frameworks for supporting GxP change control, including the production of impact assessments and test rationale documents when fixes or modifications were applied. Fourth, commercial stability and longevity: given that Roche was committing to a multi-year arrangement, the financial health and operational scale of the provider was assessed to ensure the relationship would remain viable over the contract term.

Transition Management

The transition from Oracle support to a third-party provider was managed over a six-week period aligned with Roche's annual Oracle contract renewal date. This timing is critical: Oracle support contracts auto-renew unless notice is given within a specified window (typically 30 to 90 days before the renewal date depending on the agreement). Failure to provide timely notice results in renewal obligations and potential complications in the exit process. Redress coordinated the notice process, confirmed receipt with Oracle's contract management team, and managed the parallel onboarding of the third-party provider.

The provider's onboarding process included a system documentation phase — capturing Roche's Siebel configuration, customisation catalogue, integration points, and open incident history — which was completed before Oracle support was terminated. This ensured there was no gap in support coverage during the transition window.

Outcome and Sustained Value

In the first year following transition, Roche realised $500,000 in direct support cost savings. There were zero GxP compliance incidents attributable to the change in support arrangements. Incident response times under the third-party provider matched or exceeded the service levels Roche had experienced under Oracle, and the provider's dedicated account management model provided a single point of contact for all Siebel issues — a material improvement over Oracle's multi-tier support portal.

Over the three-year contract term, the total saving reached $1.5 million — funds that were reallocated within Roche's IT budget to digital transformation priorities. The Siebel system continued to operate without disruption, validations remained current, and the provider's security monitoring framework addressed two CVEs during the contract period that Oracle's standard support would not have been able to patch for that specific Siebel version.

Broader Lessons for Enterprise Buyers

The Roche engagement illustrates several principles that apply broadly to organisations evaluating third-party support for legacy Oracle software. The first is that Oracle's insistence on full support fees being non-negotiable is a commercial position, not a legal or contractual inevitability. Organisations have the right to exit Oracle support at renewal with appropriate notice, retain their perpetual licences, and procure support from alternative providers. Oracle does not have to agree to this — but they cannot prevent it.

The second principle is that compliance-heavy environments require rigorous due diligence, not avoidance. Many pharmaceutical and financial services organisations have assumed that third-party support is incompatible with their regulatory obligations. The Roche case demonstrates that this assumption is incorrect when the right provider is selected through a structured evaluation process. The question is not whether third-party support can work in a regulated environment — it can — but whether the organisation has the framework to evaluate providers properly.

The third principle is that timing governs the economics. Organisations that allow Oracle support to auto-renew without evaluating alternatives effectively surrender leverage. The optimal window for analysis, provider selection, and transition preparation is six to nine months before the support renewal date — enough time to complete due diligence, negotiate provider terms, and execute a clean transition without rushed decision-making.

Is Third-Party Support Right for Your Siebel Deployment?

Third-party support is not the right answer for every Oracle Siebel customer. Organisations that are actively engaged in Siebel to Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics migration projects, and expect to complete that migration within twelve months, may find that the transition costs and short tenure do not justify the switch. Similarly, organisations that require access to Oracle's development roadmap — for Siebel releases that are still receiving active development — would lose that access by leaving Oracle support.

However, for organisations that are running mature, heavily customised Siebel deployments with no near-term migration plans, third-party support is a financially compelling and operationally viable option. The savings are real, the transition is manageable, and with proper due diligence, the compliance and technical risks can be fully assessed and mitigated before any commitment is made.

Redress Compliance has completed third-party support evaluations and transitions for Oracle Siebel, Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle Database, and SAP deployments across the pharmaceutical, financial services, manufacturing, and public sector industries. Our approach is always buyer-side and independent: we evaluate providers on your criteria, not ours, and we manage the process to protect your interests throughout the transition.