Joint development with Oracle a ‘feather in RPC’s cap’ says Managing Director, John Lister

RPC UK Ltd and Oracle have finalised an agreement to share the rights to sell a Unifier-based NEC4 Contract Management Solution developed by RPC as an official Oracle product, taking our solution to a wider market and offering out-of-the-box contract management to Oracle customers worldwide. 

When we first developed RPC’s NEC4 Contract Management Solution, it was in conjunction with a client, but it soon became clear that, as an out-of-the box solution, featuring preconfigured forms and workflows to minimise the administrative burden of NEC4 contract compliance, this was something that would have broad, cross-industry appeal.  

However, as Technical Director Dave Hurren points out, “Although our solutions meet requirements of customers around the globe, we are not a company with a global presence. This limited our ability to fully recognise the potential of the solution sets and opportunities outside of the UK.”  

As an established Oracle Partner – we’re 100% Oracle Redstack – we work closely with Oracle day-to-day, and they identified an opportunity with this solution to utilise ‘Partner Power’ to support Oracle product development in a new and exciting way. This is a strategy they’ve been developing over recent years, but working with us is the first time they have put that strategy into action.  

John Lister, RPC’s Managing Director, explains how this collaborative agreement between RPC and Oracle evolved: “We’ve had long conversations over a timescale of many months as to whether our NEC4 Contract Management Solution could be licensed and sold as a product by Oracle and Resellers globally. Finalising the agreement has taken quite some time, involved many hours of discussion, many reviews of paperwork and multiple departments in Oracle, but I’m so excited to say that contracts have now been signed. This will allow customers to buy an integrated NEC4 solution directly from Oracle wherever they are in the world and is sure to open up new opportunities for both organisations.” 

Joe Castner leads the Global Ecosystems team for Oracle in their Construction and Engineering Global Business Unit. We talked to him about how and why Oracle chose to partner with RPC in creating this new product:  

“The role of my organisation is to seek out those partnerships that allow us to bring an end-to-end solution to our customers in a way that’s not a two-year-long implementation cycle, but that can offer rapid deployments to get that done much quicker. Oracle chose RPC because of its intellectual property around the NEC4 processes. As we go to look for those partners that we want to build these rapid deployment capabilities with and preconfigure our solutions, we want to do it with that intellectual property in mind so that we can bring not only the applications, but also all those best practices around NEC4.      

“In essence you’re buying an Oracle capability that has those NEC4 processes and the intellectual property from our partner all built in. It’s the first one of its kind that we’ve done.”  

The solution – Primavera Unifier with NEC4 Configuration – has been developed with Oracle, for Oracle and on Oracle infrastructure, so it has the Oracle underpinning that will give customers a confidence and reassurance that beats anything else on the market. Dave has led the technical development of the solution, alongside experienced NEC4 colleague and RPC Senior Consultant, Nathan Lambert and the wider RPC Tech Team.  

Dave says, “Being approached by Oracle to convert one of our Solution Sets to a core out-of-the-box offering is an amazing achievement, which has come about through the work the RPC team has put in over the years to build out comprehensive solutions in Unifier and other Oracle technologies. We’re so proud that one of these has become an out-of-the-box Oracle solution. 

“For a ‘Tech Geek’ it is always exciting to be involved with anything that’s a first of its kind, and, for me, building closer relationships within Oracle has been very exciting indeed.” 

Although this is the first collaborative deal of its kind agreed by Oracle, it is hopefully not the last, as it brings benefits to RPC – the partner – to Oracle and to the client base, too. Joe notes that, “Traditionally, Oracle deploy the system and then we work with our customers on what are the business processes they want us to create and then we build it out. We find that if we do that across several customers, we’re probably 80 per cent there for each one, but yet we started at zero each time. Bringing a pre-configured solution allows us quick time-to-value. Off the shelf, out-of-the-box they can be up and running with NEC4 processes and then it can be tailored from there if they have any nuances that they want. It’s highly configurable.” 

“This deal is a real feather in RPC’s cap,” John concludes. “We have a fantastic team who consistently deliver to exceptional standards on all fronts. Having Oracle recognise this and pursue this deal endorses the quality of what we do. As a company, we have recently restructured to become 100% employee owned and hopefully this collaboration with Oracle will provide dividends back to the whole team – rightly so. We’re very proud.”