Oracle commits to lifetime support for all products

SAN FRANCISCO – In a move to calm the nerves of wary customers, Oracle Corp. announced that it is providing lifetime support for all its applications, including software from acquired companies such as PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards.

Speaking before thousands of attendees in this year’s Oracle Open World (OOW) conference here, key company executives led by chairman Larry Ellison assured Oracle customers worldwide that nobody will be forced to upgrade to new Oracle releases.

"Our lifetime support program shows we don’t coerce customers to move from PeopleSoft or J.D. Edwards to the next generation of Oracle products," said Ellison. "But we want to give them an attractive destination while not making it difficult for them to stay in an application they are happy with. Our users will choose the time when they want to upgrade. It’s their call."

Oracle president Charles Philips also highlighted the significance of the lifetime support to assure customers that their earlier software investments will be protected against premature obsolescence now that Oracle owns PeopleSoft, which acquired J.D. Edwards in 2003 while Oracle was bidding on PeopleSoft.

"We want to assure customers that their application investments will be protected. As long as someone is using our products, there will be some level of support," said Philips.

The lifetime support, although pricing is not available yet, helped ease some of the concerns of customers about upgrading to Project Fusion, Oracle’s next-generation application that will "fuse" four independent products – Oracle’s E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft’s Enterprise, and J.D. Edwards’ Enterprise One and World. It is expected to be completed in 2008.

General Milling Corp.’s MIS director Allen Bacallan, who attended OOW, expressed relief that the Enterprise One application he bought for his company would not go to waste with Oracle’s announcement of lifetime support.

General Milling runs an end-to-end ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) application for manufacturing, inventory and procurement, among others. It, however, also uses an Oracle 8i database.

Speaking not just for his company but also for the local members of the Asia Chapter of the J.D. Edwards Users Group, Bacallan said their association didn’t feel any anxiety when PeopleSoft bought J.D. Edwards since they saw no conflict of technologies between the two companies. "With Oracle we feel it because we see redundancy of features. The Project Fusion hangs over our heads, so the anxiety," Bacallan said.

However, he added that although his company has no compelling reason to move to Project Fusion yet, he is "being positive about the lifetime support in the sense that there will be no easing out of our J.D. Edwards application installed until we finally see a business reason to move to a new version."

Three Levels Of Support

Oracle’s new support policy provides access to technical support experts and future upgrades to major releases for all product lines for the duration of the product license and covers three stages of support.

Premier Support provides a standard five-year support policy for technology (Oracle Database and Oracle Fusion Middleware) and application products (Oracle E-Business Suite, J.D. Edwards Enterprise One, J.D. Edwards World and PeopleSoft Enterprise).

The policy also extends support for current PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards products from the current policy of four years to five years and beyond. It also covers product updates, fixes and security alerts; tax, legal and regulatory requirements; certification with new third-party products and versions; upgrade scripts; major product and technology releases, and technical support.

After the sixth year, support will automatically be converted to the Extended level, which adds another three years of support on select releases for an additional fee of about 10 to 20 percent over the Premier Support level.

On the ninth year, support will fall under the Sustaining level with access to online support tools and call center-based support.

Competitor SAP expects that many Oracle customers would not want to wait for Project Fusion and would look for other software solutions. Oracle, however, shrugged off this possibility, citing market research from Satmetrix that shows PeopleSoft and J.D. Edwards customer satisfaction rising to more than 90 percent since the merger of the companies.

At present, Oracle has over 275,000 customers worldwide, of which over 20,000 are in the Asia-Pacific where some 4,000 companies use Oracle application software.