For decades, Sybase ASE 16.0 has been the database enterprises trust when failure isn’t an option.
High-volume telecom switches. Real-time trading and clearing systems. Mission-critical clinical workloads. Intelligence systems that never sleep. These are purpose-built, high-concurrency applications that demand absolute reliability—and ASE has delivered, often with uptime measured in years, not nines.
Now mainstream maintenance from SAP is glooming its end.
What You Lose When Mainstream Support Ends
Once that line is crossed, several things simply stop:
– Regular security patches for new vulnerabilities
– Fixes for newly discovered bugs
– Guaranteed priority escalation when something breaks in production
– Legal and compliance safe harbor that regulators and auditors expect from a fully supported database
– Predictable, contract-based support pricing and response times
What remains is far more limited—typically reactive, higher-cost, and narrower in scope. For many organizations, that level of support is not viable for a database handling petabytes of transactional data under strict regulatory oversight.
The Real-World Impact
In practice, the end of mainstream maintenance turns a proven, stable database into an operational and compliance risk. Security teams flag unpatched CVEs. Audit findings appear. Insurance and regulatory bodies start asking hard questions. And when an obscure deadlock or replication issue surfaces at 2 a.m., the resolution path becomes uncertain and expensive.
A Proven Alternative: Extend with Rimini Street
Most organizations are not ready—or willing—to undertake a full migration of complex, custom ASE environments. Instead, they extend the life of the database exactly as it runs today.
Rimini Street has supported ASE 16.0 for over a decade and serves many of the world’s largest enterprises running these workloads.
– Responsive SLAs with named engineers experienced in Sybase
– Full support for custom code, stored procedures, triggers, and replication topologies
– Proactive security updates and backported fixes
– Typically 50–70% lower annual cost than vendor maintenance
This approach preserves stability and performance while giving you full control over if—and when—to modernize.
Next Steps for Technical Leaders
1. Identify every ASE 16.0 instance in your environment
2. Document business criticality, compliance requirements, and custom dependencies
3. Evaluate the total cost and risk of migration versus third-party support
ASE 16.0 remains one of the most capable transactional databases ever built.
The end of mainstream maintenance doesn’t change its strength—it simply shifts responsibility for its ongoing care.
Many of your peers have already made the switch to independent support and regained certainty. The same option is available to you.
