What are Oracle Support Renewals - Oracle Entitlement (Part 3)
What are Oracle support renewals?
A support renewal from Oracle is the annual bill that Oracle sends its customers to renew the annual support maintenance and update fees. When a customer buys a license from Oracle, the customer also pays for support and updates for that license. This means that during the 12-month period, the customer can raise support tickets with Oracle 24/7 on the licensed product they have bought. But also, the customer can update the version of the software, for example, by moving from the 18c database to the 21c database.
Support renewals are sent out automatically from Oracle three months in advance of the renewal date, but customers can initiate the renewal right up until the last few days. If renewals expire, customers can indeed reinstate the support by paying the unsupported period with a 150% reinstatement penalty attached.
Customers of Oracle usually have a few (sometimes lots) of support renewals arriving from Oracle during the year at different times, this becomes difficult to track every product and this is where licenses sometimes either get not renewed, expired, or forgotten about. This is a key reason that some customers co-term their support renewals into one ‘super’ renewal that encompasses all of their licenses in one big support renewal. This means that they only have to renew once per year. When customers co-term, it makes it slightly more difficult to cancel licenses that they do not require, but it is not impossible. As long as the licenses have their own CSI (customer support identifier), then it may be possible (with Oracle approval) to terminate licenses. When licenses are terminated, the support value for them is dropped, reducing the support renewal but also, you can never reinstate that license again — it is gone.
Sometimes it is better to terminate, expire or renew your support renewal. It depends on the product usage when bought, how many licenses were bought and what you as a customer intend to do with the licenses. I mean for example if you had licenses that must remain at a certain version and will never move from that and you get your support from a third party, then it would make commercial sense to stop renewing your support and maintenance with Oracle. On the other hand, if your support teams were raising tickets with Oracle directly on a daily basis, then it would be prudent to retain that support renewal for those licenses. It is a case-by-case basis, and it is not a one thing fits approach.
Customers of Oracle, can now renew their Oracle support renewals online via the Oracle.com website — there is a document explaining the process — but essentially you can log in with your Oracle account login details and access your renewals online — see here for more information
Summary
I urge all customers of Oracle to evaluate their support renewals before renewal time to see exactly what they are renewing, how the product is being used, and how much ‘value’ is derived from the support from Oracle. Ask yourself and the application owners, what is the strategy and what are the long-term plans for the application/product.
I would also urge customers to keep their renewals and licenses separate, to allow for easier cancellations in the future.
We are seeing customers transition to cloud-based platforms that are typically not consuming as many licenses as on-premise, so we expect a lot of customers to have shelf ware to either reharvest or save money by cancellations.
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About the author
Johnny Cree is an Oracle SAM Licencing Consultant here at Version 1.
