How to Overcome the Gap in Oracle E-Business 12.1 Support

Oracle E-Business R12.1 Support ended in December 2021. Since January 2022, Oracle has no longer provided new fixes and security updates. Customers running Oracle E-Business R12.1 will potentially face a drop in their Oracle support services, even when they continue to pay Oracle's support fees.

Version 12.2 represents a significant milestone for Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS). It includes important new functionality, such as Enterprise Command Centres and online patching, but it is not compelling for many customers.

For the first time, Oracle has confirmed a long-term EBS roadmap. Furthermore, the EBS upgrade mechanism has changed. Starting with R12.2, updates are more granular patch-based, and major upgrades are consigned to history. Oracle EBS will be developed and supported for at least another 10 years, and the cost of maintaining EBS has been reduced.

However, moving to R12.2 requires a major upgrade, which is a significant hurdle for some customers. EBS R12.1 moved to Sustaining Support in January 2022, at which point Oracle no longer provides new fixes, security updates, or legislative and regulatory updates.

Customers running EBS R12.1 face a gap in their Oracle support services, even when they continue to pay Oracle’s support fees. For such customers, we provide an Oracle EBS R12.1 Extended Managed Service with the ability to upgrade beyond 2021.

From 2022, only EBS R12.2 will receive Oracle’s Premier Support

• Upgrading to R12.2 is a major project with potentially significant costs
• These costs increase for heavily customised systems
• Some organisations cannot (yet) justify the investment in an R12.2 upgrade
• Organisations wish to avoid gaps in support for their business systems, especially for security updates

DSP has delivered comprehensive Oracle EBS Managed Services for over 10 years. This includes 2nd, 3rd and 4th line support and hosting, DBA, technical and functional services. Our success is demonstrated by our sustained excellent customer satisfaction scores and we’re proud never to have lost a customer to a competitor.

Our Extended Managed Services provides support for customers who are no longer receiving Oracle’s Premier software maintenance and support services. For customers using EBS 12.1 post-2021 and maintaining an Oracle Sustaining Support & Maintenance subscription, we will deliver a subset of our Extended Managed Services to fill the gaps left by Oracle’s Sustaining Support. This is delivered as a Managed Service and benefits from our UK delivery, ITIL-based processes, 24/7 Service Desk, Service Management and comprehensive SLAs including incident resolution times.

Before engaging 3rd party software support, regardless of the provider, it is critical to understand that only Oracle can guarantee to create code fixes for every component of Oracle EBS and its supporting technologies. This includes security fixes. Organisations requiring access to vendor-supplied security updates must upgrade to R12.2 and retain access to Oracle’s Premier support. For all other organisations, we provide EBS code fixes wherever possible or, where source code is unavailable, we implement alternative mitigations.

Oracle Payroll is excluded. Payroll is a critical function where failures can cause significant impacts.

Having analysed 3rd party legislative support, we recommend  Oracle Payroll users only source legislative patches from Oracle.

Support from January 2022 for all severities of incidents relating to: customisations; performance issues; data corruption; integrations; standard BI Publisher & Oracle reports output, and product fixes for Oracle EBS 12.1.3 and the underlying technology stack

Limited to customers using:

• EBS for UK or/& Ireland organisations with an English language installation only
• 12.1.3 of Oracle e-Business Suite with recent CPU and RUPs applied (< 12 months)
• A certified and supported version of the database with Oracle EBS 12.1.3
• Recent CPU / PSU database patches 
• Recent CPU and recommended patch levels for all associated Oracle technology
• The latest certified and supported version of their current operating system
• Java Web Start
• Oracle Corporation’s support & maintenance services
• Subject to a Claremont Health Check and remediation of any underlying non-conformities 
• Core HR, Employee and Manager HR Self Service, Oracle Time and Labour, Oracle Learning Management, Compensation Workbench, Advanced Benefits and iRecruitment HR modules of Oracle EBS
• Oracle Payroll for the storage of payroll data for integration and reporting. Explicitly excluding the processing of payroll data for payment and legislative purposes
• GL, AP, AR, CE, FA, IBY, OIE, IEX, ZX, Purchasing, Procurement and Order Management financials modules of Oracle EBS
• Custom configuration and customisations in the modules above, including workflow, AME, OAF and associated integrated reporting
• Excluding Oracle Payroll legislative patches and the processing of payroll for the payment of employees
• Excluding Java compatibility with browser, desktop, operating system or third-party integrations and tools
• Excluding 3rd party products not certified for the unsupported version of Oracle EBS
• Excluding security fixes that are outside the supported DB and OS versions
• Excluding fixes where the Oracle source code is unavailable, however, Claremont will endeavour to provide a workaround

• Organisations retain access to full EBS support for R12.1 and will also have the ability to upgrade beyond 2021
• Investment in an R12.2 upgrade can be avoided or delayed
• No time limits on R12.1 DSP Extended Managed Services – organisations may remain on R12.1 indefinitely
• Core EBS modules supported (see scope, except Payroll)
• Support delivered via a proven Managed Service framework backed by meaningful SLAs
• Flexibly combine with any of DSP's other EBS Managed Services