*Still* using Oracle 11gR2?
Last year (almost to the day), I wrote an article about Oracle's Market Driven Support (MDS) offering. The full article is here and worth reading if you need an introduction. A lot of organisations still have a large number of 11g databases in their estate, however Extended Support ceases at the end of this year. To get any sort of transition between Extended and Sustaining support, Oracle offer MDS. By way of a reminder, Oracle support levels work as follows, with reducing coverage between each level:
- Premier Support: latest version of software plus those generally released within last 5 years. Your bog standard '22%' (or less) annual support and maintenance fee.
- Extended Support: select, stable older versions of software. Uplift on Premier Support cost. Typically applies to a subset of your estate, e.g. all your 11gR2 databases, not all your 10g and 19c databases.
- Sustaining Support: effectively out of support (though Oracle wouldn't say it in those terms!); access to existing updates and fixes as well as continued upgrade rights.
Market Driven Support is a supplemental Advanced Customer Services (ACS) offering. It is worth noting that ACS sell professional services delivering specific effort from consultants. MDS is therefore not an 'intermediate' support stage between Extended and Sustaining Support: you are buying professional services.
Information on the details behind MDS have been a long time coming and with little notice before 11gR2 goes out of Extended Support (in less than 80 days). What we've learnt so far:
- It'll be sold under a professional services agreement rather than a change to support. I'd hope this is obvious based on what I've said above...
- The offering is as it was last year: Sev 1 Service Request fixes and CPUs, Upgrade Planning workshop (I still don't get the point of this) and a Technical Account Manager for escalation (I hope this isn't an expensive part of the offering!).
- We've seen a number of attempts from Oracle to explain the pricing but it appears to be based on the number of databases or database instances (there is a difference: RAC) depending on which customer Oracle are talking to.
- Pricing appears to vary by customer, often quoted on a tiered basis.
- We have seen (in some cases) Oracle ask for database identifiers (e.g. SIDs or DBIDs); presumably to restrict databases for which calls can be raised against. This can be flawed; not everyone runs dbnewid after cloning!
- We haven't yet seen any executable ordering documentation for MDS.
The MDS proposition is different to the 'patches only' Extended Support desired by most organisations. Pricing and deliverables still seem unclear.
It seems like Oracle are waiting until the last minute to get MDS agreed for a lot of customers. If you need help further understanding the offering, whether you need it and how much you need, please feel free to contact me or talk to us.
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