All,

This is a long one but well worth your time and effort to read and fully understand the ramifications for your organization.

There has been a lot of confusion around Oracle Support and the end of Premier Support and additional Extended Support fees especially as it relates to Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) users.  I’ll try to make it as clear as I can :-) …

A “Typical” EBS Environment Scenario: The customer is running Oracle E-Business Suite Release 11.5.10.2 on Oracle RDBMS 10gR2.  The customre is also running Discoverer 10g for thier Financial Reports. (I’m not sure that there is ever a “typical” EBS environment but this will do for our purposes..:-)).

There are three types of Oracle Support available – Premier, Extended and Sustaining.  Premier Support last five years, Extended Support lasts three years and Sustaining Support (not always offered) lasts as long as you license the product.

Premier Support is full support of the product, Extended Support is exactly the same as Premier Support except for third-party products/new Oracle product modules (there is some confusion here as it’s stated differently in two lifetime support documents) except for the main difference in that there are additional support fees charged for each of the three years (only) of Extended Support (first year – 10%, second year – 20%, third year – 20%) and Sustaining Support (if offered) which provides support and patches for known issues but any new issues that can not be reproduced by Oracle support will not be addressed. No additional fees are charged for Sustaining Support. Please see the official Oracle Lifetime Support documents for more details (http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html).

1 – Premier Support for Oracle E-Business Release 11.5.10.2 ends November 30, 2010. Some (most?) of us will move into the Extended Support window starting December 1, 2010 and can stay on Extended Support for three years (2011, 2012, 2013) assuming that we apply the minimum patches (also referred to as the MANDATORY minimum patch baseline) as required by Oracle support (My Oracle Support document, 883202.1) by November 30, 2010. There are a significant amount of patches to be applied especially if you have not maintained your patch levels.  Also, for HRMS customers, there are three My Oracle Support documents that you’ll want to closely review (R11.5.10.2 – 11499.1 , R12.0.x – 386434.1 and R12.1.x – 858794.1)

2 – Premier Support for the 10gR2 database ends on July 31, 2010. We will move into the Extended Support window starting August 1, 2010 and can stay on Extended Support for three years (2011, 2012, 2013).  However, a fair number of customers will, hopefully, be on RDBMS 11gR1 or 11gR2 by September 30, 2010 and will then move back to the Premier Support window for the 11gR2 RDBMS until January 31, 2015 (The 11gR1 Premier Support window runs until August 31, 2012).  This is the Good News section…:-)  If you are sticking with 10gR2, you must patch to 10.2.0.5 which is the terminal release for 10gR2 and you will be paying Extended Support for years 2 and 3.

3 – Premier Support for Discoverer 10g ends on November 30, 2011.  You will need to upgrade to Discoverer 11g by the end of 2011 to avoid any Extended Support fees for Discoverer 10g.

PAY ATTENTION HERE

The Extended Support window fee waiver for E-Business Suite Release 11.5.10.2 and RDBMS 10gR2 was announced two years ago by Oracle at the Oracle Applications User Group conference for the first year of Extended Support ONLY for Release 11.5.10.2 AND RDBMS 10gR2.  This may be a critical cost driver for your environment and for the R12.1.x upgrade.

In the worst case scenario where Oracle does not extend the fee waiver for 2012 and 2013 we will have to a 20% additional fee for Release 11.5.10.2 and an additional fee for 10gR2 every additional year that we stay on Extended Support.  If we stay on Release 11.5.10.2 after Extended Support ends on November 30, 2013 and move to Sustaining Support, there are no additional fees for Sustaining Support but we then have a fairly large support and maintenance risk that we have to accept.  This applies to the 10gR2 database support as well.

Steven Chan (Oracle’s preeminent Applications Technologist) explains E-Business Support here:

http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2009/06/object_windowed_support_fees_waived_for_ebs_11510_and_10g_db_through_2011.html

and the RDBMS Support here:

http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2010/05/ebs_db_11g_upgrade_whitepaper.html

and the Discoverer 10g Support here:

http://blogs.oracle.com/stevenChan/2010/04/oas_10gr2_premier_support_change.html

We have spent a significant amount of time working through the Oracle documents with Steven Chan and ensuring that they are consistent with each other as part of my other duties on the OAUG Board.  We are both very comfortable that all ancillary notes and documents are consistent with the official “Lifetime Support Policy” documents on Oracle’s website - http://www.oracle.com/support/lifetime-support-policy.html (I’ve attached the technology, middleware and application Lifetime Support Policies).

As always, I would recommend opening a SR with Support to validate any and all information you are gathering specific to your environment.  You’ll have something in writing that may need to be referred to at a later point in time.

Good luck and happy patching!

Please let me know if you have any other questions.

thx,

John