Where Oracle Market Driven Support Falls Short
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.
The MDS offering includes the following service components that are not available with Oracle Sustaining Support:
- 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
This offering is fine and dandy, but unfortunately, we have to look at the fine print to fully understand the number of limitations, restrictions, and exclusions that come with MDS, such as:
- 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.
In addition, it’s important to note that with MDS, the EBS product is covered except for the underlying database. Please take all of these restrictions and limitations into consideration when deciding what is the best option for your unique needs.
Risks of Not Extending Support
By now you know that Oracle Market Driven Support is far from being your one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to keeping your EBS up to date with the latest patches and updates. With that being said, it’s a much better option than being left without any form of support.
If you decide to stay on EBS 12.1 at the end of Premier Support, you must be prepared to come to terms with the several risks of doing so.
Let’s put a dollar sign on those risks so you can get a clearer picture of what you will be exposed to:
- With no new patches and updates, the average annual cost of non-compliance with regulations or tax laws can reach up to $14.8 million USD.
- With no new security updates or patches, the average cost of a data breach can reach up to $3.92 million dollars—about 60% of breaches happen because a patch was not applied.
- The downtime average cost of newly detected bugs can reach up to $300K per hour.
These numbers give perspective on the potential losses of not receiving patches and security updates, which is why it’s critical to stay as well-informed as possible when making a decision of when to schedule an upgrade.
If you’re wondering about why we’re rushing you to upgrade if Premier Support ends until December 2021, let us share the factors that you need to carefully consider, even if it seems as if you have plenty of time to make the upgrade happen.
These factors are:
- Database support: As mentioned above, MDS covers the EBS product but not its underlying database, so it’s particularly important that you are aware of the current EBS database version you are on and how its support timeline aligns with your needs. We strongly recommend that you are on version 19c of Oracle Database as it’s the most current, long-term release.
- EBS add-ons: Regardless of the support model that works for your needs, you must thoroughly review that the version of your EBS instance is certified to work with the database and application versions. The more add-on products you run, the more important upgrade planning is. Everything should be certified to work with everything else in the EBS ecosystem, so be sure to plan ahead of time given the fast-approaching deadline for Premier Support.
- Third-party solutions: EBS is far from being an isolated product. Instead, a multitude of our clients integrates it with 3rd party solutions that range from browsers, logistics, payroll and benefits, tax software, and AP automation, to name a few. With so many 3rd party players in the game, it’s important to consider their overall compliance and alignment with 12.2 requirements.
- 12.2 changes: While online patching has been widely publicized as one of the major key changes in 12.2, there are a number of user experience changes and functional innovations that are just as valuable, like those made to order management to support selling “Products as a Service” or the Enterprise Command Centers that greatly improve the user experience. With thousands of enhancements, we recommend that you analyze these changes based on the modules and features you use.
- CEMLI remediation: With CEMLI remediation, customers upgrading to 12.2 need to make sure all CEMLIs are compatible with 12.2 standards because of online patching. Depending on how many CEMLI you have, it could take a considerable amount of effort to review and remediate all of them, so you need to assess that effort and plan ahead.
Conclusion
Oracle EBS 12.1.3 Premier Support expires on December 2021 and will transition into Sustaining Support effective immediately on January 1, 2022—it’s safe to say that the clock is ticking.
We highly encourage you to evaluate if you plan to complete the upgrade to EBS 12.2 or the move to Oracle SaaS on time so that you don’t lose critical new fixes, updates, or security patches.
One of the available options from Oracle to not lose support altogether is Oracle Market Driven Support. As we’ve detailed throughout this post, this option buys you additional time and features to bridge the support gap and you continue to operate safely and stably.
Oracle Market Driven Support is by no means a comprehensive or long-term solution, but it does alleviate some of the problems that customers may face after December 2021.
For even more information about MDS, please watch our on-demand webinar where our ITC in-house team of experts dive deep into the nuances of MDS and the coverage it offers.
Overall, if we can leave you with one key takeaway is this: plan thoroughly and with enough time so that you don’t lose support for your EBS.
