Introduction
Last week, we held the “Expedite Your EBS 12.2 Upgrade Before You’re Desupported: Proven Expert Strategies” webinar where our experts, Gustavo Gonzalez, CTO at IT Convergence, and Brian Crowley, Executive Director at IT Convergence, discussed the pressing questions in the minds of those interested in upgrading their EBS to Release 12.2.
By far, two of the biggest concerns in everyone’s mind are around how fast the upgrade can happen and how Market Driven Support actually mitigates support gaps. The webinar was packed with valuable information and actionable insights about:
- The differences between Market-Driven Support (MDS) vs Premier Support and why MDS is not a substitute for Premier Support.
- How to speed up the upgrade by getting some items done in advance.
- Fastest upgrade strategies available (typically under 20 weeks) that take budgetary, risk, and knowledge transfer concerns into account, like a fully-staffed approach or resource-sharing models.
If you’d like a full play-by-play on this webinar, you can watch the on-demand event.
Towards the end of the webinar, we held a Q&A section that we include in this blog post so you can see what our experts answered about some of the most critical EBS questions.
Q&A Section
Q1: Would I have to continue paying the support of EBS and an extra for Market Driven Support?
Yes, EBS clients will have to continue to pay for support for EBS. Now, as far as paying extra for Market Driven Support, that is also a given and something that EBS clients need to consider when thinking about this option as a viable solution. To reiterate, Market Driven Support does translate into additional costs, so make sure you consider that when budgeting for your EBS.
Worth mentioning is that the Market Driven Support cost will be determined based on how Oracle will measure it across multiple levels depending on the support, how support is paid, the amount of the current support, and some variables including globalizations, customizations, whether you have Payroll in your EBS, etc., all of which impact the overall cost of MDS. Our recommendation is that you contact your Oracle or ITC representative to find out more about that.
Q2: Is there any information on how much it will cost?
Calculating the cost of Market Driven Support is on a customer-by-customer basis. While there is no straightforward answer as to how much it will cost, we can give you a ballpark estimate that ranges from an extra $25K to $225K.
Q3: If we are considering moving into SaaS (Fusion Applications), is it an upgrade path from EBS to Fusion?
It’s an implementation. Depending on how you want to plan, consider change management, run your business practices with the adoption of the cloud, then of course it’s going to be something more to consider. There are set ups that can be copied into Fusion but the bottomline, it’s an implementation and not an upgrade.
Q4: We have a lot of Oracle reports. Should we convert them to BI Publisher reports or keep them as Oracle Reports?
There’s not one overall best answer. The thing to consider is that if the customer runs custom tables, then it becomes a licensing issue. But if the reports are made on standard tables, you might want to consider changing them to BI Publisher reports to ensure they maintain the same functionality and the same look and feel for your business.
Q5: Can you upgrade from the Solaris platform?
Yes. It’d be important to understand what operating system the client is on, but there are options available to upgrade from the Solaris platform. If the question is that if you’re on Solaris and would like to stay on Solaris, migrated to 12.2, that can absolutely happen.