Avoiding the Technical Risks of Third-Party Support

You need to ensure that your business systems are as progressive as your business strategy. That's why Oracle Support Services provides you with the industry's most comprehensive support programs. With Oracle Support Services, you get the commitment of our organization and world-class technology—dedicated to ensuring your success and extending your Oracle applications and technology investments.

No other support organization can match Oracle's breadth and depth of technical expertise, advanced support technologies, or global reach. Our plan for ongoing updates and enhancements keep your systems and products up-to-date and running smoothly, and our technical information and expert advice help you resolve problems quickly and effectively. With Oracle Support, your applications and technology products will run smoothly and deliver maximum availability of the information that drives your enterprise.

Several third-party support providers have materialized in the applications support space. As some customers may be curious about third-party support due to the prospect of lower support costs, significant tradeoffs exist.

Technology and Platform Updates
Oracle is the only vendor who can provide fixes for the PeopleSoft PeopleTools and JD Edwards Technology Foundation technology platforms. Third-party support organizations cannot provide patches and fixes because they do not have access to the underlying source code for PeopleTools or Technology Foundation. Access to patches and fixes is extremely important if security vulnerabilities or critical bugs are discovered. Without support directly from Oracle, customers may be exposing their mission-critical systems to significant risks.

Only Oracle's support team can provide updates to PeopleTools and Technology Foundation to support planned new versions or releases of third-party technology components such as: browsers, databases, application servers, operating systems, and hardware server architectures. As these components mature, the technology vendors will likely discontinue support of older versions, which may require an upgrade to a more current version. Without updates to the PeopleTools and Technology Foundation platforms, customers run the risk of running their mission-critical applications on a technology platform that is unsupported. In addition, customers cannot take advantage of any planned future technology enhancements, without access to planned periodic platform and technology updates from Oracle.

Major and Minor Product Releases
We continually invest in our products and solutions so you have access to the latest technologies, industry best practices, and any planned new product functionality for the software you've licensed. Your support fees are an annual investment that you make in your Oracle solutions. They provide you with access to planned future releases, when and if available, for the products you've licensed so you can take advantage of product and technology enhancements to your business on the leading edge, ensuring that the systems that run your business stay up to date. You get maximum return on your Oracle investment with the latest technologies, industry best practices, and new product functionality that may become available.

Tax, Regulatory and Legislative Updates
Your company is required to meet certain regulations or government-stipulated changes such as tax code changes or new laws. Recent examples include Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA. The third-party support industry is an immature market, and vendors may lack access to the engineering-level expertise required to develop software enhancements for government-mandated changes. Customers who choose a third party support vendor assume a significant risk that the vendor may not be able to provide the required business functionality, or meet support service level agreements. With Oracle, you can ensure that your systems are up to date with the most current tax and regulatory requirements where available.

Global Support Quality
Oracle delivers exceptional support for information-driven enterprises in more than 150 countries. We leverage our technical expertise and services to proactively lower the total cost of ownership of maintaining our software. Our continuous product enhancements, global reach, advanced support technologies and technology leadership help customers unlock more value from their existing applications and technology solutions. In providing these services, we strive to deliver a superior ownership experience that combines real business value and customer satisfaction.

The breadth of our knowledge, and the scale and global reach of our support organization, allow you to unlock the value of your existing technology and applications and ensures your technology's future. The result for your enterprise is optimal performance, a lower total cost of ownership, and a greater competitive advantage.

Oracle Support Services Global Support Centers follow strict guidelines for quality certifications to ensure that we have the processes in place to meet and exceed your expectations of our product and service quality. We're committed to following best practices and maintaining certifications. These include:

	ISO 9001 certification for PeopleSoft support worldwide since 1997
	BS/EN/ISO 9001:2000 certification for Oracle support in Europe since 1997
	Rigorous ISO 9001:2000/TickIT certification for PeopleSoft in 2002
	December 2004: PeopleSoft received the Support Center Practices (SCP) Practices Worldwide Certification

These certifications provide you with the confidence in the effectiveness of our operational processes and procedures and with more predictable and consistent support levels including problem resolution and verification, routing and diagnosis, and escalation management.

	JD Edwards World products are supported by our strong IMB eServer iSeries hardware relationship. The JD Edwards World product team has direct ties to the IBM iSeries team and may create patches for World if security vulnerability is found. JD Edwards World uses the security function of the IBM iSeries operating system. We work closely with IBM iSeries development to optimize and verify the security on the server.
	Only Oracle's JD Edwards support may issue patches if a bug is found in World applications and may provide updates to World HTML/Java interfaces to support new browsers.
	Oracle's JD Edwards support professionals participate in Technical Review Boards with IBM and are notified far in advance of any major changes to IBM hardware, databases or operating systems. If new versions are released, JD Edwards World is tested and may be updated as required. Only Oracle's JD Edwards support has access to World source code and may provide updates.
	The Global Support Center is staffed with senior JD Edwards World analysts with in-depth product knowledge. All analysts are certified support professionals and highly specialized in focused areas with an average tenure of six years.

With Oracle, PeopleSoft, and JD Edwards Support you get the support you need, when you need it. Our goal is to keep your Oracle application and technology systems running smoothly—without interruption—today and in the future.

This document is for informational purposes only and cannot be incorporated into a contract.