Can Oracle Limit and Control the Usage of Your Licensed Software?

April 19, 2018

In Spinnaker Support’s newest white paper, entitled “Why It’s the Right Time to Sever Ties with Oracle’s Application Support”, we include a section on roadblocks and tactics deployed by Oracle to counter its third-party support competitors and to retain its install base customers. Tips are provided by Spinnaker Support to help third-party support prospects safely navigate around each roadblock.

Yet another development has surfaced since the white paper was published. We recently became aware of a significant change in Oracle’s Support Portal terms of use. As of February 1, 2018, Oracle has placed additional download and use restrictions on its customers. Specifically, two fundamental changes in the My Oracle Support (MOS) terms of use have impacted portal users in two ways:

  1. A portal user must agree not to download materials from the support portal unless they reasonably believe that the materials will be used within 90 days for support of authorized Oracle products.
  2. A portal user must agree that they will not download from the support portal more than 500 files per day.

Every Oracle support customer is impacted, not just those who are investigating support alternatives. While Oracle does retain the rights to update their MOS terms from time to time, from our perspective the defensibility of this recent change is questionable because it may constitute a material change to the terms of use and could impact a customer’s ability to fully utilize licenses that the customer has paid for. It should be noted that Oracle’s Software Delivery Cloud, a separate resource website for the download of current enterprise software, is not affected by the change in use terms for MOS.

Archiving and Third-Party Support

Oracle customers that are active on Oracle support are legally entitled to download and archive an array of information. Before customers make the official switchover to third-party support, Spinnaker Support works with customers to execute an archiving process, to ensure that available patches, minor enhancements, and content files are legally downloaded and safely stored should customers wish to implement them later. Spinnaker Support never forces time-based upgrades as a condition of retaining a premier-level support. An archive allows customers to advance their applications on their own terms and timeframes, not Oracle’s.

The change in Oracle’s Support Portal Terms of Use prompted us to review our archiving process. Even though we view the change as questionable, we found that Oracle’s new use terms have no material impact on our ability to effectively archive and support customers. As always, Spinnaker Support will adhere to Oracle’s new terms, even though we question the defensibility of these terms. Our fully-trained software engineers and archivers will continue to engage with customers directly, ensuring all archived information is accessed legally and accurately – never using robots or other automated tools to obtain that information.

Spinnaker Support Recommendations

  1. If third-party support might be right for your enterprise, don’t allow Oracle roadblocks to hinder your investigation. Thousands of organizations that run Oracle have already made the switch to upgrade support quality, save money on maintenance fees that can be directed to fund immediate innovation, and to take back control of their ERP roadmaps.
  2. Regarding their new roadblocks, express your disappointment and work towards a solution with Oracle that does not restrict or control your use of the software you own.
  3. Work with Spinnaker Support to determine what information you can legally download. Determine what is necessary to download and store. Ask yourself if you will you ever apply the patches available to you knowing that only 1.8% of Spinnaker Support’s customers have leveraged archived information to date.

No matter who’s providing the support, Oracle’s restrictions apply to all supported customers. This latest roadblock issued by Oracle should cause concern. How much more control of your ERP landscape do you want Oracle to seize?

Download the white paper: Why It’s the Right Time to Sever Ties with Oracle’s Application Support

Oracle Support Approaches… Service-First or Software-First

April 5, 2018 | Lee Mashburn | Vice President, Marketing

There are many sources of information that compare features and benefits of software vendor support to third-party support. Oracle customers can investigate the differences using websites, blogs, analyst notes, etc. Rather than focus on features, this blog considers differences in philosophy, approach, business objectives, and service goals.

Business Objectives

Oracle is a software and technology company that aspires to become the dominant player in the cloud. They want customers for life, preferably paying customers. Software support drives massive revenues with 90% profit margins, fueling Oracle’s investment in cloud solutions and their shift away from on-premise applications. Oracle seems to use support as a lever to move customers through a perpetual innovation cycle. Support is largely an end to a means.

Spinnaker Support has a different business objective. Support is a means to an end. Profits, which don’t approach the 90% level, are promptly reinvested to improve service quality and breadth. Over 70% of our employees serve customers every day, delivering high-quality, responsive, and personalized support. We don’t expect to keep customers for life, understanding that customers want the flexibility to embrace new technologies as they emerge.

Support and Service Personalization

The centerpiece of Oracle-provided support is a portal, called My Oracle Support – promoted as a one-stop shop support solution for Oracle customers. Maintenance-paying customers can search for solutions, download patches and updates, access tools, collaborate in the community, and create new service requests. Automated tools confirm service request severity level and push out links to information that might relate to the service request description. To us, this self-support model seems anything but personal.

Spinnaker Support delivers highly personalized support. It’s a completely different approach and philosophy. Every Spinnaker Support customer gets a dedicated Account Support Lead (ASL), very experienced and battle-tested. After thorough due diligence, a team of named engineers and archivists are assigned to each account, based on the customer’s application environment, technology stack, ticket history, geographic footprint, language requirements, IT staff capabilities, planned IT roadmap, etc. This team becomes intimately knowledgeable, which is reflected in faster response, quicker issue resolution, higher value concerning ongoing interoperability, etc. This a quite different from a portal-based, self-service model.

Service Issue Ownership and Accountability

Oracle’s support infrastructure is not designed to drive cross-functional teamwork for issue resolution. Product-based support resources, no doubt very knowledgeable, work in silos. Teaming across products, technology stack components, interfaces, non-Oracle products, etc. to identify and resolve issues is often rarely performed well and drives little-to-no issue ownership. Oracle never works in customized code to troubleshoot and fix issues – even though the majority of support issues originate in customized code. Service requests can be stopped until customers prove that the issue is not caused or impacted by customized code.

Spinnaker Support does not care where an issue originates: applications, technology stack, standard code, custom code, interfaces, etc. We share in the ownership of our customers’ issues and are helping resolve many issues that occur outside the base application code. The teams we assemble for customers combine application, development, technology, security, interoperability, managed services, cloud, and other experts. Our SLAs mandate quick response and our only objective is to ensure that every issue presented to us is successfully and promptly resolved.

Conclusion

Spinnaker Support focuses all resources and investments to achieve service excellence, as measured by the collective voices of our customers. We define service excellence as offering the most valuable services, delivered by elite engineers, and achieving best-in-class customer satisfaction, retention, and willingness to recommend.