EBS 12.1 dropped to Sustaining Support in January 2022. A migration is the one moment you are allowed to ask what you actually own — and E-Business Suite responsibilities are where the recoverable licences hide.
Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 had been in Premier Support since May 2009. It left Premier Support in December 2021, and from 1 January 2022 it has been on Sustaining Support.
At the time, customers who were planning to move to EBS 12.2 but could not complete the transition before that date were able to use Oracle Market Driven Support to bridge the gap. That was always a time-limited arrangement, and it is not a route to plan around now.
On Sustaining Support you can still raise assistance requests for EBS 12.1 issues and download patches that already exist. What you do not get is anything new: no new critical patch updates, no security alerts, no new fixes, and no regulatory or tax updates.
For a system that runs finance and procurement, the absence of regulatory updates tends to force the issue faster than the absence of security patches does.
This post was written when 12.2 was the destination and the timetable felt tight. It is worth saying plainly what has happened since: Oracle has repeatedly extended Premier Support for EBS 12.2 under its Continuous Innovation model, and now commits to it through at least 2037.
That removes the deadline pressure, but it does not remove the opportunity. If anything it makes the case stronger. A migration is the one occasion on which everybody in the business will answer questions about what they use, and 12.2 being supported for another decade means the licensing decisions you make during the move are decisions you will live with for a long time.
Moving between releases is time and resource-intensive, and it raises questions that are uncomfortable precisely because nobody has had to answer them for years:
E-Business Suite has been around long enough that early adopters are deeply entrenched in it. That makes moving to a different vendor’s product unappealing, which usually leaves an in-place upgrade as the only realistic long-term option. Certero has seen many organisations with a long history of EBS use, and the pattern repeats: a trail of application licences reflecting decisions taken years ago, some of which stopped being useful long since, and others where the organisation was quietly under-licensed because somebody misunderstood how user activity mapped to entitlement.
Both of those are worth finding before you migrate rather than after.
The traditional way to analyse on-premises EBS was the Active User Report. You exported the file, decoded it, and translated it by hand into a list of users mapped to responsibilities and then to application licensing. It is a long process and it is full of opportunities to get something subtly wrong.
CerteroX SAM removes that step. Its Oracle engine reads E-Business Suite responsibilities directly from the supporting database, so the user → responsibility → application linkage is derived rather than reconstructed. A number of EBS rules are applied out of the box: end-dated users are removed from the compliance position, and system-generated items are excluded automatically. That matters because it gives you an immediate view of which applications are in use — including the ones you should have bought a licence for — and exactly which users have access to them.
Take Purchasing as an example of an EBS application licence. The dashboard shows you how many users are assigned to it and how many responsibilities are associated with it. From there:
That second question is the one that drives the number down. Application licensing follows responsibility assignment, and responsibility assignment is almost always broader than it needs to be, because it was easier to grant than to justify.
Everything in the EBS view can be filtered and searched, which is what makes it useful to more than one audience. Once inventory is running, dashboards can be built to report the specific things each stakeholder cares about — the application owner, the licence manager and the finance business partner are not looking at the same numbers.
If you are moving to EBS 12.2, we recommend the following order:
CerteroX SAM covers the Oracle detail that this work turns on: E-Business Suite responsibilities, options and packs with supporting evidence and the ability to override a detection, processor types and core factors, licence pools with hosting rights and geographic rules, cover-down logic for Enterprise Edition, and uncapped quantity handling for unlimited agreements.
Certero is also a verified third-party tool vendor with Oracle License Management Services — in Certero’s published wording, that means Oracle’s audit team can accept data from Certero during an official audit, as an alternative to installing Oracle License Management measurement tools.
If you would rather not do this with in-house Oracle licensing expertise, it can be contracted instead. Certero runs an in-house Oracle licensing team, and this kind of engagement is what they do. Start at Oracle licensing or talk to us.
Other posts covering the same ground.
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No gated download at the end of it.