Earlier in June, Oracle downgraded all its older relational database releases prior to version 19c to Sustaining Support status.

According to third-party support provider Rimini Street, Sustaining Support offers a limited scope of support, which may not be sufficient for a production environment. Rimini Street claimed the price to customers of Sustaining Support is the same as the full Oracle Premier Support.

Premier Support is Oracle’s top tier of support and includes patches, security, legislative changes, bug fixes and access to My Oracle Support. The next level down, Extended Support, runs for a further two to three years after Premier Support ends.

Figures from Support Revolution show that Premier Support contracts include an 8% price rise each year, on top of the 22% of the original contract value customers have to pay for this level of support. Extended Support offers the same benefits of Premier Support but costs 10% more in the first year, then an additional 20% in years two and three, as well as the annual 8% price rise. Sustaining Support provides major product updates for the product release the customer uses and technical support, but no security updates or patches. The cost of Sustaining Support also increases by 8% a year.

The figures from Support Revolution show that a customer running a £3.65m Oracle 19c database installation would end up paying almost £8m in support fees to keep the database running for 10 years.

In its latest Magic Quadrant for cloud database management systems research, Gartner reported that the Oracle Autonomous Database offers the price and predictability of a resource-based model with the automatic scalability of a consumption-based model. Gartner said that although Oracle offers a credit for on-premise support costs based on the amount of cloud spend, which may have cost benefits, the company has a reputation for tough licensing terms and negotiation techniques.

“The perceptions created by these practices linger, resulting in the perception that Oracle’s cloud offerings will be more expensive than others,” the Gartner report stated.

Looking at the changes Oracle has made to the long-term support of its database products, Rimini Street said it appears to be trying to pressure Oracle Database licensees to upgrade to the latest Oracle Database releases that qualify for Oracle Premier Support.

To keep databases running and patched, Oracle said it recommends customers upgrade to 19c, which is the Long Term release. This has a support end date of 30 April 2027 if customers pay for Extended Support, otherwise it will be supported until 30 April 2025.

“If you are currently running 11.2.x/12.1.x, you will need to upgrade to the Terminal release for the database release you are running and then continue the upgrade process to 19c,” the Oracle note stated.

In other words, Oracle requires customers moving from an older version of the database to the latest release to buy each and every upgrade until their system reaches the current release level.

Unfortunately, as Rimini Street CEO Seth Ravin pointed out, this is an extremely costly and disruptive exercise. “There is no appetite to start a project to update a database if it does not have to be updated. It’s not a high priority unless there’s a specific reason and a return on investment for making that change.”

Having spoken to a number of major enterprises that often have hundreds or thousands of instances of Oracle Database, and usually run many different versions, Ravin said, for most, “the reason for not migrating to the latest version is cost”. Not only do IT departments have to find the budget to pay the licence fee, but there is also the additional work required to migrate the database system. “It can take years, and the return on that investment just is not strong enough,” he added.

Ravin described the IT industry as acting as a cartel to get customers to upgrade. “The vendor decides that they only want to service the latest version and they force customers into potentially hundreds of millions of dollars worth of IT project,” he said, adding that such upgrades feed the industry. “If the customer’s not doing something new, nobody’s making money.”

Third-party support does offer an opportunity for some organisations to escape the upgrade cycle. Companies such as Rimini Street and Support Revolution would say their software maintenance contracts offer significant savings over Oracle. But the bigger savings may arise as IT departments start to limit the size of their Oracle footprint.

New projects can be ring-fenced, like a greenfield site, to enable them to be developed using an entirely different database management system. For large, complex, enterprise systems that cannot be migrated away from Oracle, third-party support allows IT departments to avoid having to pay to upgrade to the latest version to obtain Premier Support. When they are finally ready to upgrade, they then negotiate a brand new Oracle contract.

Like many in the IT industry, Ravin would hope customers spend the bulk of their IT budget on innovation that drives business outcomes. However, far too much is being spent on keeping existing systems running. This is where Rimini Street sees its role.

For Ravin, too many people confuse mission-critical systems – such as like Oracle Database, which is often the system of record for enterprise applications – with strategic IT. While a CIO has a good chance to get funding for strategic IT projects that power innovation or drive efficiencies across the business, not many will win out in an argument over funding an upgrade.

Have you met an enterprise software auditor? If you’re working in IT in a large organization, the answer is probably yes.

Employed by large enterprise software vendors, these software police reserve the right to sniff infrastructure in search of isolated instances. And if they find it, you may find a big bill to land at your doorstep.

USU Group, a leading provider of IT solutions and services, announced today that their USU Software Asset Management solution has been verified by Oracle for data discovery of Fusion Middleware products. Combined with their prior verification for Oracle Database and Database Options, the USU solution can provide valuable data for end-to-end coverage of a company’s Oracle environment.

USU is a trusted partner of Oracle, and this new verification ensures their data collection meets or exceeds Oracle’s standards. Customers can use the USU solution to gather accurate data about the installation and usage of Fusion Middleware products, and submit it in a software compliance audit, instead of using Oracle’s measurement tools.

“Customers asked us about discovering Middleware because the applications are so complex. That complexity makes it a serious audit risk. With this verification, our solution provides the reliable, granular data they need and with accuracy they can trust,” said Philippe Bonavitacola, USU Product Manager for Oracle.

USU Software Asset Management is verified by Oracle for its discovery of Middleware applications such as WebLogic, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Business Intelligence, Tuxedo, Webcenter, Forms & Reports, and Oracle SOA.

The specialized Oracle solution is also verified for collecting installation and usage data for Oracle Database and its related options and features. It uses that data for its compliance reporting and deep optimization features. Important tasks include detecting and downgrading databases, excluding options that could be false positives, and deactivating costly accidental activations.

Oracle is seeking more than $7m in damages from long-time software partner NEC Corporation of America (NECAM) – a subsidiary of tech Japan-based tech giant NEC Corp – over a complaint about copyright and breach of contract.

According to papers lodged yesterday with the US court in the Northern District of California, in December 2019 Oracle carried out an audit of NECAM’s use and distribution of its database software.

Although NECAM has been a member of the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) since 2004, the audit found issues related to “unreported royalties.”

A letter sent by Oracle in October 2020 called on NECAM to “resolve the compliance findings within 30 days.”

This was followed up with a letter from Oracle dated 19 January 2021, telling NECAM that due to its failure to resolve the audit findings, Oracle considered “NECAM to be in material breach of its agreements with Oracle.”

According to court documents, matters came to a head in March when Oracle sent another letter terminating NECAM’s OPN membership and its 2018 Master Distribution Agreement (MDA).

Now the dispute has been brought before a judge as Oracle seeks redress.

“Oracle has repeatedly asked NECAM to resolve the audit compliance findings, but NECAM has not done so. To date, NECAM has not paid the full license and support fees NECAM owes for its distributions of Oracle software,” Oracle alleged in its complaint.

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