Market Driven Support
With Premier Support for EBS 12.1 coming to an end in December 2021, it’s important that you understand the available Oracle Technical Support Policies available to extend your support.
Once this date arrives, and if you haven’t taken any steps to modernize your EBS, your Oracle E-Business Suite will move into Sustaining Support where you will still have limited maintenance, but you will no longer have access to new patches, fixes, or updates.
On Sustaining Support, your EBS instance can be exposed to high-risk outages, low performance, security vulnerabilities, and regulatory compliance violations. Of course, all of these risks can translate into increased costs.
Enter Oracle Market Driven Support, or MDS for short, Oracle’s new offering as part of their support timeline. This service offering is a hybrid form of support provided by Oracle Development in conjunction with Advanced Customer Services (ACS) and it is made available to cover the years 2022 and 2023.
Oracle Market Driven Support is not your typical Oracle Extended Support but can be used in the spirit of planning early for your EBS modernization and mitigate any support gaps upfront. Keep in mind that MDS coverage is better than Sustaining Support but much less comprehensive than Premier Support.
Market Driven Support Service Components
- Critical fixes, and/or workarounds for newly-discovered product issues resulting in Severity 1 and 2 Service Requests
- Periodic critical security patches and updates
- Legislative and regulatory updates, as well as payroll-tax updates for selected countries
Market Drive Support Limitations, Restrictions and Exclusions
- No access to Platinum services
- No access to limitless tax, legal, and regulatory updates
- No middleware and integrations
- No access to any type of certifications for most 3rd party products
- No architectural changes
- EBS product exclusions
- Payroll country limitations
Oracle MDS is a means to mitigate some of the risks of losing Premier Support while clients strategize for their next move: upgrading or moving to the cloud. While MDS is far from being as comprehensive as Premier Support, it does help somewhat close the support gap and buy time for organizations. As mentioned earlier, Oracle does charge for the MDS service, and it’s purchasable on an annual basis, meaning costs can reach half a million dollars in the long run.
Can You Migrate to the Cloud Without Oracle MDS?
There is a niche of clients who are interested in moving to the cloud without having to pay for MDS, and we know it’s a lingering question for many whether this can actually be done.
To that we say, yes, you can stay on older versions of EBS and move directly to SaaS without having to purchase MDS. But it’s not as simple. There are a lot of risks in doing so and it’s strongly recommended that you don’t take this approach as you may be exposing your hefty EBS investment and the wellbeing of your business to costs and unwanted risks which could cost you millions of dollars.
Instead, the recommendation is to pay for MDS, and either upgrade to EBS R12.2 or migrate to Oracle SaaS solutions as it’s really unwise to upgrade or migrate with only Sustaining Support.
What Market Driven Support Means for Your Upgrade or Migrate Efforts
For many EBS clients, staying on-premises is the right choice while for others, the right choice is to move to the cloud. When having that conversation and looking at everything that needs to be done when migrating to the cloud, one cannot leave out Market Driven Support out of the equation.
Market Driven Support is Oracle’s temporary solution for those on-premises clients that haven’t upgraded their EBS yet. Unfortunately, time is virtually over for EBS clients below Release 12.2 as the deadline to upgrade and stay under the Premier Support umbrella is the end of calendar year 2021.
With a few weeks left, clients below R12.2 will be automatically cut off from Premier Support and entered into Sustaining Support which offers very, very limited support. In anticipation of this, Oracle in collaboration with Advanced Customer Services (ACS), devised Market Driven Support, or MDS for short, as part of their offering to bridge the gap for those clients that would lose support starting 2022.
MDS offers partial support for the years 2022 and 2023. While it’s far from being the perfect solution or a comprehensive form of support, it is better than only staying on Sustaining Support.
Many clients are using MDS as a way to plan their EBS upgrade and mitigate support gaps for the two years it covers. Still, there are many clients who have no clear path for upgrading or that haven’t purchased MDS.
