You Think You Have Time
Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) clients with versions below release 12.2 will reach the end of their Premier Support in December 2021. With a growing list of critical actions to take to prepare your EBS for an upgrade, it’s safe to say that time is running out.
To help you keep access to critical fixes, patches, and updates, we want to help you navigate through the challenges of upgrading your Oracle EBS and/or moving it to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
For this post, we present you with two real-life cases of clients who failed to upgrade their Oracle EBS and how each resulted in unwanted costs and higher risks due to vulnerabilities in the system.
Client Case 1
For the first client scenario, the case is of a manufacturer in the semiconductor industry running on Oracle EBS version R11. This client has been on version 11 of EBS for a long time and was forced to discover just how critical system fixes and updates are after encountering important issues in their Oracle EBS instance.
When first considering an upgrade, the client understandably weighed the costs of upgrading to Oracle R12.2 and decided to accept the risks of not upgrading and staying on Sustaining Support. (For context, Sustaining Support is a much less comprehensive form of Oracle support than Premier Support. It does not include updates for Payroll, Tax, Legal and Regulatory requirements as well as many other important updates and fixes).
Their reasoning behind the decision not to upgrade was that because they don’t have a lot of international business relationships and were running smoothly on R11 so far, the need for an upgrade was not justified.
One year ago, they submitted a helpdesk ticket to ITC requesting assistance to fix a bug with their inventory process. In a nutshell, the bug made all their Finished Goods inventory get “stuck” in the system and as a result, they could not ship and invoice products to any customers.
Inventory is the lifeline of manufacturing companies, so having inventory that couldn’t be shipped out to customers, was nothing short of a disaster.
Oracle fixed this known bug on version 12 of Oracle EBS but because Oracle EBS R11 is unsupported, the client was unable to receive this bug fix.
A customer shipment shutdown translates into losses of both money and customer satisfaction for every product that’s not being shipped, and the client was under a severe strain to solve this quickly. In the end, an IT Convergence team helped solve this bug issue by creating a new CEMLI extension and the client was able to resume production but not without heavy losses.
Client Case 2
For the second client scenario, the case is of a Services and Distribution company that had not yet upgraded to the latest version of Oracle EBS.
Monthly security patches are the norm in up-to-date Oracle EBS instances. Since the client wasn’t running the most recent version of Oracle EBS, they fell behind on security patches which exposed them to unwanted vulnerabilities.
Hackers found a security flaw in the Oracle Weblogic server and exploited it to mine for Bitcoins. As you can guess, mining for Bitcoins requires an impressive amount of computing power. Our team was able to identify that something was odd about our client’s EBS instance.
With cybercrime predicted to inflict $6 trillion dollars in damage to organizations, security breaches are an indispensable factor to assess as part of any business strategy. Jack B. Blount, former CIO at the United States Department of Agriculture says that “every American organization – in the public and private sector – has been or will be hacked, is infected with malware, and is a target of hostile nation-state cyber intruders.”
This assertion is backed up by top cyber defense experts and Fortune 500 Chief Information Security Officers.
Cyber threats are real and can generate multi-million dollar losses for your business, so it’s important that you keep your software modernized and patched with the latest security updates.
Take Action Now
These real-life scenarios paint a clear picture of how important system fixes, updates, and security patches are for any system. In the context of Oracle EBS, it demonstrates the value of taking the necessary steps with enough time and careful planning to upgrade EBS to R12.2 and avoid being exposed to the risks of losing Premier Support.
With different forms of support including Premier Support, Extended Support, Sustaining Support, and Market-Driven Support, we can help you plan a course of action to upgrade your EBS successfully and protect your investment against the increased risks and costs of working with an unsupported version.
Download our Support Comparison infographic where you can visually identify the type of coverage each support option offers.
