All,

As a follow-up to my previous posting, another set of questions was posed and nicely addressed by a colleague of mine. I’ve added his responses here. Thanks go to Morrow.James@gmail.com!!
Here’s some reasons why you should consider an upgrade to Release 12 now.

1. Support deadlines are rapidly approaching. (July 2011 is only 8 months away for the 10gR2 Extended Support waiver expiration!)

2. Customers on Release 12.x will, generally, be better positioned for Fusion Applications when they are GA (available to the public)

3. I (We) strongly suspect (with no real technical information to back it up) that the upgrade to Fusion will go much more smoothly from R12.x. We have heard rumors, however, that Oracle intends to embed more and more of the Fusion Applications Tech Stack into the Release 12.x Tech Stack in future releases of Release 12. We do know that the technical upgrade from Release 11i is one of the easiest we’ve seen but the functional changes are SIGNIFICANT. Don’t under estimate you testing timelines and resources.

4. Given the general reluctance of many Release 11i customers to upgrade, I (We) strongly doubt that many will want to upgrade to Fusion 1.0. My (Our) suspicion is that most will probably wait for a Fusion V2.x product. This means that they would likely not be upgrading to Fusion until 2015 at the earliest unless they start with “Pillar” upgrades which is another topic for another day. This means that many customers have been on 11i for 10 – 13+ years! Lots of good ROI at that point assuming that they pay the Release 11i Extended Support Fees for 2012 and 2013! and maintain the minimum patch baseline as Oracle mandates.

I (We) really think that points #1 and #4, in particular, would carry the most weight. I (We) also think that many customers have “Fusion comes out Q1 2011″ in their minds and haven’t really considered #4 yet.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions/comments/concerns.

As an aside, OAUG will be publishing a report from Oracle OpenWorld from the Co-Chair of the OAUG Fusion Council tailored specifically around the Fusion Applications. Keep you eye out for the document – it’s an excellent article and well worth the read regardless of your current EBS/Fusion plans.

thx,
John