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Jon,
Yes - it is obvious that I do not get involved in Oracle Support Agreements.
However, Oracle's presentations qualify that:
- there is Standard Support (for version of JDE that are current)
- there is Premium Support (for versions of JDE that no longer qualify for Standard Support)
XE, as I understand, falls into the category of Premium Support. That said, how much more is Premium Support, than Standard Support?
(db)
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First of all, you're wrong about XE's support category. Until 2013, which is 10 years after Oracles takeover of Peoplesoft/JDE, XE is under support. There is no "better" support - XE will be enhanced by platform support (ie tools releases) as well as ESU's. Oracle resents this - but it is a contractual obligation to ensure continual support of an existing product line.
That is why XE is under the same support as, say, 8.12 or 9.0 right now - as opposed to, say 8.10 or 8.9.
There is no difference in maintenance payments of an older product. Oracle theoretically continues to take the same maintenance price from their 8.9 customers as they do their B7332 customers and 9.0 customers. The only difference was that more recently, Oracle increased maintenance costs across the board - and any customer needing a license modification, ends up being moved to the new licensing model (and hence the new maintenance cost model).
Its complicated to explain in one sentance, so I'm going to provide two examples.
Example 1 is a company who has 200 concurrent licenses. They purchased OneWorld Xe in 2000 for the retail price of, say, $800,000. They have been paying maintenance every year of $136,000. After 11 years, they have paid a total of $1,496,000 in maintenance payments. They decide to upgrade to 9.0. Eliminating the whole redstack/bluestack conundrum - they pay $0 to Oracle, because they don't have any licensing issues and they're current on maintenance. After their upgrade, they continue to pay $136,000 a year in maintenance....
Example 2 is a company who has 200 concurrent licenses of XE, but they wish to roll out additional functionality that 9.0 has to new users. This company bought XE for $800,000 and have also been paying maintenance every year. But Oracle now doesn't have any concurrent licensing model, so they perform an audit. The company squeaks by the named licensing count of, say, 400 - but to roll out, they're going to need an additional 100 named licenses. So, they pony up an additional $200,000. Lets say this then also results in them getting redstack (as a bonus). So the company then goes ahead and upgrades. At the end of the upgrade, on 9.0 - the company now pays about $220,000 in maintenance a year..
I think that explains things pretty well.
There is no difference between "standard" and "premium" support on price. The difference is that "standard" support only provides bug-fixes to existing software at existing technical requirement levels. Premium support provides enhancements, bug fixes and new platform support. Both support options provide the data support (tax and governance etc) - though these can be manually entered if necessary, or can be derived from 3rd party (such as vertex).
Now, there USED to be "Bronze, Silver and Gold" support levels when JDE was around. Pretty much there was a difference in the quality of support between Bronze and Gold. Mostly in the way you were treated over the phone. The minimum was "Bronze" - which I told companies to get back in the late '90's and early '00's (I have some posts on the subject WAAAY back when) and use the difference in price to pay for a good consultant AND to save money ! Ah, the heady good-old-days of JDE !
I might be wrong - but that is the experience I've had from other customers - but its a shady, shady world, and support contracts are often very long, arduous affairs, and most companies prefer to keep their support contracts very quiet...