As an Oracle EBS customer, you must be aware that Oracle has stopped offering premier support upto Oracle EBS 12.1.3. End of premier support means that paying licensing, you won’t be able to receive new updates, fixes, security alerts, data fixes, critical patch updates, new tax, legal, and regulatory updates and new upgrade scripts. If you’re wondering what would be your next option, this blog is for you. Here, we’ll discuss what your options are and how you should prepare to embrace those options.
Get support for your current instance: At the expiry of premier support, the very first option you’ve is that you can opt for “support”. The different types of supports available are listed below.
- Extended support: You can opt for “extended support”. This type of support is made available for 3 years after the expiration of Premier Support. The drawback with this support is that it doesn’t cover certifications with third party products and versions.
- Sustaining support: This is another type of support that you can opt for once Premier Support expires. Since this is a limited support and doesn’t cover updates, fixes, security alerts and critical patch updates, there are chances that you may encounter problems like system outages, cyber attacks, and an underperformed instance.
- Market Driven Support: Advanced Customer Services (ACS) is provided by Oracle and covers 2022 and 2023 at various cost tiers. It is provided to mitigate specific support gaps, however, due to its limited nature, it can expose your instance to security vulnerabilities.
Oracle EBS upgrade to 12.2.X: Although Oracle is pushing hard to deliver innovative updates for the cloud, yet it understands the importance of on-premise EBS applications. That’s why it is offering its customers a trusted, secure, comprehensive support so that you can avoid the potential risks. However, customers need to upgrade to Oracle EBS 12.2.X to receive Premier Support on the Continuous Innovation releases till 2033. Once you upgrade to the EBS 12.2.X release, you don’t have to worry about the additional expense of Extended Support for the next 10 years.
If you’re looking to upgrade from Oracle EBS 11i or Oracle EBS 12.1.X, you need to understand that it is a major upgrade that can be disruptive to your business. So, you cannot ignore the importance of testing. Your environment is unique in terms of architectural configurations, setup data, and customizations. You need to concentrate on testing efforts and your efforts shouldn’t limit to generic EBS tests.
Since manual testing isn’t a viable solution, you need a test automation platform like Opkey that autonomously generates upgrade impact for your critical business flows to ensure faster and risk-free Oracle EBS 12.2.X upgrade.
Oracle Cloud migration: Undoubtedly, cloud is the next big thing. Many enterprises can take the end of premier support as an opportunity to migrate to Oracle Cloud. Customers now have the flexibility to run Oracle EBS with the same Oracle technology stack in the Oracle Cloud. However, Oracle Cloud migration can be a significant shift, culturally and technology-wise.
Since you’re moving from an on-premise environment to Oracle Cloud, you need to execute multiple rounds of testing – pre migration, during, and post migration to ensure that your Oracle Cloud environment is properly configured, sized and your enterprise apps are performing as expected after the migration. To make your Oracle Cloud testing faster and accurate you should rely on test automation tools like Opkey. As a leading Oracle test automation platform, Opkey ensures faster and risk free Oracle Cloud migration with its prebuilt test accelerations, AI-powered process discovery, and risk based test automation.
