With May being a popular month for Oracle Support renewals, we thought it would be a good time to discuss some of the topics we get questioned about regarding Oracle Support renewals.
Some of the concepts listed in this blog will reference specific sections from the Software Technical Support Policies document, which can be downloaded here.
Canceling Support
There are a couple of topics to consider when canceling support for Oracle licenses. You may choose to cancel support for licenses you are not using or that are no longer needed.
License Termination
Because of the Oracle “Matching Service Levels” policy there might be situations where you would need to terminate some of your licenses even though they are listed as “perpetual” licenses on your ordering document.
The Matching Service Levels policy states that all licenses within a license set must be supported at the same level. For example, you couldn’t have one database license that is under support and one or more licenses that are not supported. The reasoning behind this policy is that you could get support or download patches for the unsupported database(s) using a database that is under support. License Sets are further defined in the Technical Support Policies document.
If you cancel support for a product and have products within the same license set that are still supported, you must terminate the license for those products where support was canceled. The only way to maintain those licenses would be to cancel the support for all the products and quantities within the license set. You would maintain the license in that case, but you would not be able to get technical support, patch, or upgrade the products in that license set.
Support Fee Repricing
Another section in the Software Technical Support Policies document is “Pricing Following Reduction of Licenses or Support Level”. This section states that if you terminate the support for a subset of the items within an order, then Oracle can reprice the support costs for the remainder of the items up to the list price support.
If you have an order where you are canceling a subset of the licenses, Oracle will reprice the remaining items on that order using the list price for support. Note however, that the repriced cost cannot exceed the previous total support cost for that order.
In some cases, there would be no savings after the repricing, and you would likely need to terminate the licenses being canceled because of the restrictions imposed by the Matching Service Levels policy. It might be more advantageous to hold onto those licenses that were going to be canceled since there would be no savings by dropping support.
We have helped many customers evaluate their Oracle Support renewals to determine if there would be any cost savings by terminating support for licenses no longer in use. If you would like help evaluating your licensing situation or need help reviewing your Oracle renewals, contact the House of Brick License Management team.
