Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) is the steady pulse of enterprise operations. For CIOs, it anchors financial precision, supply chain flow and HR reliability. The 2025 CIO Oracle EBS Market Puls confirms its strength: 83% of respondents affirm EBS as important to their business, with nearly all reporting consistent value. In short, it delivers quietly and reliably.
At the same time, CIOs face mounting pressure to modernize their technology landscape and deliver transformative innovation. Yet there’s a catch: These ambitions must be achieved within existing constraints such as legacy systems, limited budgets, resource shortages and the need to maintain compliance and uptime for mission-critical operations.
CIOs face a dilemma: They need to innovate, stay stable and cut costs — all at once.
Upgrades typically cost millions, often $5 to $10 million for mid-sized enterprises, according to a 2024 IDC report. They disrupt operations, risk customizations developed for competitive advantage and tie up IT teams for years. Research shows that 60- 70% of IT leaders spend more time maintaining systems than innovating. And mainstream Oracle support, which typically costs 22% of license fees annually, drains budgets further.
The question IT leaders should be asking isn’t how to upgrade EBS to 12.2. It’s how to unlock its full potential faster and without breaking the bank.
The challenge: Upgrades aren’t always the answer
Picture a logistics firm managing $3 billion in global shipments. A new EU regulation requires real-time analytics for compliance. Oracle pressures an EBS upgrade to maintain eligibility for Premier Support— an estimated $8 million in costs, two years to complete and a risk to custom workflows that have been in place for decades. But EBS 12.2 already supports robust analytics. Why rip and replace a stable system for marginal gains?
A common misconception is that upgrading is simply a necessary cost of running EBS. In reality, many organizations encounter challenges with compatibility, deployment costs and business disruption — often driven more by vendor influence than by actual business requirements. The CIO Market Puls reveals top upgrade concerns among senior IT decision-makers running EBS:
- Compatibility with customizations (50%)
- Deployment costs (43%)
- Business disruption (38%)
Another common assumption is that EBS updates consistently deliver innovation. The upgrade cycle often delivers unclear ROI and little transformative innovation, with many organizations unaware that viable alternatives exist. In fact, prior surveys indicate that current EBS versions are already considered feature-rich and meet most business requirements.
The stakes are high. A failed upgrade could disrupt $3 billion in shipments, delay compliance and erode stakeholder trust — all while failing to deliver the innovation needed. Our logistics firm’s CIO pauses and asks: Is there a smarter way?
A new approach: Innovation without upgrades
What if you could enhance EBS without a complete overhaul?
Agentic AI ERP is a proven solution, layering intelligent automation over existing systems without disrupting or replacing a still valuable EBS instance. It transforms the system into a proactive platform — one that anticipates, adapts and streamlines operations — within weeks, not years and with no upgrades, migrations or replatforming required.
Research shows that agentic AI can cut operational costs significantly by automating process optimization, resource allocation and other tasks. For EBS users, this means turning a transactional system into a strategic engine.
That logistics firm, for example, could deploy AI agents to automate 35% of supply chain tasks, cutting lead times by 20%. [Note: This is a hypothetical example — but not an unrealistic one.]
Agentic AI also solves a major CIO pain point: interoperability. The CIO Market Puls notes that for 97% of organizations, this is of the highest priority. Agentic AI enables seamless integration with best-of-breed tools like HR, CRM and analytics, while keeping EBS as the core. Organizations can avoid an unnecessary and unwanted upgrade while still enhancing their IT ecosystem with the modern UX and cutting-edge capabilities they require.
The cost-saving, innovation-accelerating edge
Let’s talk more about numbers.
Upgrading to cloud ERP, like Oracle Fusion, can cost 1.5x more than optimizing on-premises systems. And the ROI? Often questionable.
Instead, many CIOs are extending EBS’s life with third-party support and choosing to innovate around the edges using a composable ERP approach. By keeping valuable systems running longer, with compliance, security and support taken care of, organizations can add the features and functions they want today, without worry of vendor lock-in or inflated costs.
Rimini Street, the global leader of third-party support for Oracle and provider of Agentic AI ERP innovation solutions, immediately reduces Oracle’s annual maintenance fees by up to 50%, offering direct, higher-level support that includes customizations, guaranteed service level agreements and resolution time for priority cases in the client’s preferred language and a host of benefits that extend far beyond the savings. This strategic move frees up significant dollars each year to self-fund higher-impact innovation initiatives and reallocates critical talent resources for more strategic projects. Rimini Street’s ERP expertise and innovations, which span support, managed services and Agentic AI capabilities, enable ERP to become the resilient system of record — the foundation for everything built around it. Instead of costly upgrades, we accelerate modernization by layering innovation on top, helping clients self-fund transformation and evolve existing systems into next-generation platforms for automation, efficiency and growth
As Go Harada, General Manager, Information Technology at OSG Corporation, explains: “Signing with Rimini Street restored our ability to take control of our IT roadmap based on our business needs, and as a result, we achieved significant reduction in our fixed costs for Oracle maintenance and operation. These costs accounted for 86% of our total IT budget. With Rimini Street, we are no longer on the upgrade treadmill and we’re able to drive our total IT costs down to 78%, giving us the funds and flexibility to invest in creating new value.”
No upgrade. No disruption. Just smarter operations.
The winning solution: Rimini Street + Agentic AI ERP
Here’s the turning point. With 59% of IT leaders aiming to lead with AI-driven innovation, Rimini Street’s Agentic AI ERP solutions offer a practical path to modernization without disruptive upgrades.
The CIO Market Puls confirms that reducing risk, meeting support requirements and maximizing investments are top CIO priorities. These are priorities that Rimini Street not only shares but delivers on through extraordinary service.
This isn’t about replacing EBS. It’s about making it smarter, more cost-effective and future-ready.
Key takeaways
CIOs, the Oracle EBS 12.2 upgrade path is a trap. With Rimini Street and Agentic AI ERP, you preserve your investment, cut costs and create a resilient system for business operations. The future isn’t a forced migration to cloud — it’s composable, intelligent and built on the foundation you already own. Learn how Rimini Street can help you stop chasing EBS upgrades and start unlocking value h
