Many Oracle customers are currently facing a May 2020 maintenance renewal deadline that may lock them into another year of high costs, limited innovation and falling behind.
IT today is facing a mandate from the business to evolve beyond a cost center to a source of innovation and growth. However, CIOs running Oracle can be caught in a cycle of paying high annual maintenance and support fees, while potentially being forced to spend tens of millions of dollars on upgrades and/or updates over the next decade — driven by the Oracle-centric support timetable. CIOs are losing control of their roadmap decisions and struggling to find the budget and resources to meet this mandate.
This vendor-dictated model can expose the business to greater risk today and with every year that CIOs wait to make a change.
Luckily, CIOs today have another choice with independent, third-party support.
Fund Innovation, Gain Competitive Advantage
Your Oracle applications and database software is mature, stable and more than supports your business requirements. However, many Oracle customers today have major concerns, including the high cost of maintenance of their software, the lack of innovation they are seeing on the Oracle roadmaps, and the potential lock-in to an Oracle Cloud strategy that may be lagging behind the industry leaders.
Expert, independent support can replace your Oracle annual support, providing you with bug fixes and tax, legal and regulatory updates, 50% savings on annual maintenance fees and up to 90% savings on total cost of maintenance, while fully supporting your current mature releases for up to 15 additional years.
With third-party support, you get relief from high maintenance fees and no longer have to perform expensive upgrades or updates just to keep full support, so you can shift your focus and investments to delivering the initiatives your business needs.
High Cost, Little Value from Oracle’s Current Roadmaps and Annual Support
Oracle today has nearly no new major releases of their EBS, PeopleSoft, JDE and Siebel applications published on their roadmaps. Instead, Oracle has simply extended full support for many of the current releases until 2030.1 This has left many Oracle customers questioning the amount of new measurable value they are receiving for their annual maintenance and support fees.
According to a detailed analysis of many Oracle ERP applications, including E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft, dozens of Oracle applications are receiving little to no updates at all, confirming many Oracle customers can pay maintenance without receiving meaningful new value.
Some estimates place the potential cost of staying with Oracle Premier Support and applying Continuous Updates from Oracle at potentially $20 million through 2030, leaving many customers to question the ROI of this spend to their business.
Expert, Independent Third-party Support is a Proven Strategic Option
With high operating costs consuming as much as 90% of IT budgets just “keeping the lights on,” you cannot deliver the initiatives your business needs by simply maintaining the status quo. Leading industry analyst firm Gartner Research says evaluating third-party support is an important alternative:
“Evaluate third-party support as an alternative to the vendor’s support, in order to help fund future innovation.”
Any Oracle customer facing an MED this May 2020 is advised to consider all the options and see the potential savings that can be gained and invested where the business needs it most.