Black Friday is widely recognised as one of the most lucrative retail events globally, and also marks the beginning of the critical festive shopping period. This particular holiday is somewhat synonymous with special promotions, amazing bargains, and extended trading hours.
But what makes Black Friday such a success?
Well, without getting too heavy on the psychology, it’s a matter of a human predisposition. Studies have found that certain words and phrases, such as ‘discount’, ‘sale’, ‘50% off’ and ‘deal’, light up the reward system in our brains. Plus, in a further study, researchers discovered that people who receive discounts experience heightened levels of oxytocin – the “feel-good” hormone.
The thrill of snagging a great deal is not mutually exclusive with the likes of shoes, laptops, and holidays, though. In fact, you could score your organisation an amazing deal on a recurring cost – support for your Oracle estate, for example – and experience that burst of oxytocin again and again.
So why limit the joy of fantastic savings to just once a year, when you could benefit from exceptional cost savings all year AND for the foreseeable?
While many providers will jump on the Black Friday bandwagon, it’s pretty unlikely that Oracle will be offering any kind of discount scheme – unless you count Oracle Support Rewards (which you can find out about in more detail here).
And, although often overlooked by many organisations, vendor support eats away at a large portion of your IT budget. Seemingly a necessary cost, many organisations continue to pay exorbitant rates to receive ongoing support and maintenance for their Oracle estates.
However, the vendor’s support offering is, for the most part, a swindle.
The price of Oracle Support can increase by up to 24% a year, depending on the support tier your products are on. Meanwhile, the level of support your organisation receives will be trending in the opposite direction, until you’re effectively paying a higher price for a lesser service.
Paying more for less doesn’t seem right, so what exactly is it that you’re missing out on? To better explain the differences, below is a simplified breakdown of the support features offered by Oracle and the support features offered by Support Revolution:
| SUPPORT FEATURES | ORACLE SUPPORT | SUPPORT REVOLUTION |
| Service requests | Yes | Yes |
| 24/7 support | Yes | Yes |
| Cloud services | Yes | Yes |
| Functionality patches | Recent products only | All products |
| Legal & regulatory patches | Recent products only | All products |
| Security patches | Quarterly | Within 48 hours |
| SLAs: Response | Limited | Yes |
| SLAs: Resolution | No | Yes |
| Support for customisations | No | Yes |
| Support for performance issues | No | Yes |
| Interface support | No | Yes |
| Monthly service reports | No | Yes |
| Account management meetings | No | Yes |
| Assigned primary contact | No | Yes |
As you can see, unless your organisation is willing to keep on keeping up with the Oracle upgrade cycle, the number of support features available become pretty sparse. And yet, you may very well be paying an annual support bill that is twice the amount you paid for the first year of Oracle’s Premier Support.
Not exactly the “great value” you were hoping to stumble across this Black Friday.
But, fret not.
Just because Oracle won’t be cutting its customers any sweet deals, it does not mean that your organisation can’t make killer savings.
Opting to move to third-party support could see you reduce your support bills by at least 50%. That’s right, at least 50%. Last year, our customers saved an average of 64% on their annual support costs. That’s definitely something to feel good about!
Support and maintenance services are at the very centre of our operations, so we don’t need to spend millions on researching, developing, and marketing new products or Cloud strategies. This means that we can pass those savings onto organisations like yours.
However, our reduced prices don’t come at a cost to the service you receive.
Regardless of where you are in the world, we offer support services 24/7, including security patches within 48 hours, functionality and regulatory patches, and support for customisations.
We also uphold an unparalleled incident resolution process (say goodbye to Oracle’s self-help guides for critical fixes) which is underpinned by two core SLAs: one for a response time and the other for a resolution. You can be sure that we won’t leave you hanging for an undetermined amount of time.
Better still, we’ve amassed more than 20 years of Oracle expertise and have the capability to support ALL Oracle products (even those the vendor itself no longer deems worthy of support), so you can break free of the costly upgrade cycle and stick with your tried and tested system.
We know this might sound a little too good to be true, so how about we show you just how much you could be saving with third-party support?
Why wait to secure yourself a fantastic deal once a year when you could benefit from amazing savings all year?
Third-party support will not only drastically cut your costs but could help you invest in the future of your organisation, so you can feel good this Black Friday (and everyday!) about your support partner.
We’ve helped customers operating in different industries around the world to make incredible savings and take back control of their IT roadmaps. If you want to find out a little bit more about which organisations we’ve helped, and how they have been enjoying the Support Revolution experience, head over to our Customers section.
Or you can use our savings calculator to see just how much your organisation could be saving with us:
© Support Revolution. All rights reserved.
