Last November, Oracle announced the release of Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) 12.1.11, a release that’s packed with tons of technology application improvements that further cement Oracle’s commitment to the ongoing investment and support of Oracle EBS for its on-premises clients.
Back in 2018, Oracle announced that any and all iterations of Oracle EBS release 12.2 would be part of its Continuous Innovation model, a pledge to provide Premier Support through at least 2032 with what seems to be yearly increments on an ongoing basis.
Premier Support is Oracle’s most comprehensive form of support that provides new fixes, updates, and security patches, ensuring your Oracle EBS instance is safe, productive, and optimized to meet the demands of the modern business environment, one that is especially fast-paced and demanding due to the current health crisis the world is experiencing.
With Covid-19 in the picture, many businesses were faced with the challenge of going completely remote, which meant that workloads were happening online in cloud-based systems. In turn, this meant that businesses began to take a harder look at application modernization, be it by upgrading to the latest software release or migrating to the cloud.
Regardless of the decision, the truth of the matter is that it’s extremely unwise to work with a desupported software version as you’re effectively exposing your hefty software investment to the added costs and unwanted security vulnerabilities of an unprotected application.
With only a few days to this calendar year, Oracle EBS clients who didn’t upgrade to EBS R12.2.x or migrated to the cloud will be losing Premier Support. What this means is that your system will be vulnerable to cyberattacks, outages, and system failures. If your industry is manufacturing, this could translate into millions of dollars in losses or a complete halt to your day-to-day operations and the loss of business opportunities.
The Risks of Third Party Support for Oracle EBS
Many EBS clients fall into the illusion of believing that if their system is currently stable, why upgrade or migrate? Unfortunately, it doesn’t really work like that.
While you may be running a very stable version of EBS, that does not exempt you from experiencing major issues, and if you’re desupported, any major issue could completely shut down your operations, with costs growing exponentially, especially for production type organizations and manufacturers. We highly recommend that you read our ebook “Why Organizational Change Management Is Critical for your EBS 12.2 Upgrade or Cloud Migration” so you get a greater understanding of how Organizational Change Management (OCM) is a pillar of any EBS modernization effort as it helps identify the current state of your EBS system to simplify and make it more effective to manage the transformation that comes with a more modernized EBS.
Imagine not being able to ship, order, or process orders. If you don’t have any support from Oracle, it would be a true hassle to solve the issue.
With many clients not taking necessary steps to either upgrade to EBS 12.2 or migrate to the cloud, there’s a temporary solution developed by Oracle that’s called Market Driven Support that mitigates some of the support gaps for the years 2022 and 2023. But it’ll cost you.
This is where third party support for Oracle EBS comes into play. Many EBS clients have been sold on the idea that third party support for Oracle EBS is just as good as Oracle’s support, but the fundamental issue is that any and all forms of third party support for Oracle EBS lack Oracle-based developed support. No matter how much third party support for Oracle EBS solutions advertise they can protect your system, they will never be able to access Oracle-based code in order to provide support fixes to major issues as no third party support for Oracle provider can fix any underlying technology issues. Only Oracle can do that.
In addition, third party support for Oracle EBS providers cannot offer coverage for technical class issues such as security fixes, fixes to the underlying technical components, certifications, and more, as they don’t have any form of Oracle access to provide solutions.
All in all, it’s highly inadvisable for you to expose your instance to any form of third party support for Oracle EBS. Only Oracle can provide enough coverage to fully protect your software and your mission-critical tasks.