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Oracle Support – some dates for your Diary

I recently came across two useful articles on Steven Chan’s Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Blog detailing the various levels of support that Oracle provide for all of their products, both on the Applications and Technology sides of the business. The articles contain links to PDFs on the main Oracle website that show the actual End Dates for the various levels of coverage for all of Oracle’s products.

Support Stages

Oracle has three stages of support:

• Premier Support
• Extended Support
• Sustaining Support

Premier Support is obviously the best level of support and is offered immediately after a product release. The benefits are:

• Major product and technology releases
• Technical support
• Access to My Oracle Support
• Updates, fixes, security alerts, data fixes, and critical patch updates
• Tax, legal, and regulatory updates
• Upgrade scripts
• Certification with most new third-party products/versions
• Certification with most new Oracle products

With Extended Support all that you lose is the “Certification with new third-party products”. This doesn’t sounds like too much of a problem, but you would need to be careful before rolling out new versions of your browser or integrated products, such as Microsoft Office.

Finally, Sustaining Support is the lowest level of support, but you still have the following benefits indefinitely:

• Major product and technology releases
• Technical support
• My Oracle Support

Coverage End Dates

I would like to draw your attention to a couple of key dates in the near future:

July 2010

In just over 2 months time Oracle Database 9.2 will drop from Extended to Sustaining Support. This will impact any E-Business Suite customers who are using EBS 11i on a 9i database; I would highly recommend that you upgrade to Oracle 10gR2 or 11gR2 as soon as possible.

Also at this time, Oracle Database 10gR2 will drop from Premier to Extended support. This may be less of an issue for our customers, as you still have another three years before Sustaining support kicks in. However, some organisations may prefer to have all their Applications and Technology on Premier support; if so, you need to start planning your upgrade to 11g.

November 2010

Near the end of this year Oracle E-Business Suite 11.5.10 will drop from Premier to Extended support. As with DB 10gR2, you will have another three years before support drops to Sustaining, but if you aren’t already planning an upgrade to R12, I would consider starting the exercise in the next few months.

26 May, 2010 by Robin Harris

E-Business Suite