We’ve written before about the dangers of Oracle’s recent contractual changes to its support agreements. However, there’s now one clear reason to cancel your Oracle Support autorenewal: An autorenewal means automatic price rise.
You read that right.
We’ve been trying to find out why so many Oracle customers have been reaching out to us this year after a 4% price rise in their support fees (and why so many had the exact same increase of 4%).
We initially thought that its sales teams were just particularly well coordinated this year. But looking into Oracle’s own documentation on its support auto-renewal process explained why:
Then at the end of the Support Period specified … the technical support services will Auto Renew for an additional Support Period at the fees specified … which will include Oracle’s then current percentage increase over the prior year’s fees.
Source: Auto Renew Terms & Conditions in the Oracle Store
The very same document makes a big point of the “benefits” of auto-renewal:
- No need to proactively accept renewal of new support period
- Terms and Conditions are accepted once upfront
- Customers avoid support interruptions
- Customers can elect to renew via invoice
All of these benefits (if you can call them that) are highlighted up front. But the real reason for Oracle’s autorenewal scheme is hidden in a wall of text at the end of the document: autorenewal means automatic price rises. No negotiations, no appeals – just a flat 4% increase if it hit you this year. This may rise in subsequent years.
What can you do?
Cancel your Oracle Support autorenewal. That’s it.
Oracle has automatically opted you in for a price rise. Opt out and go back to manually negotiating your support renewal (trust us, Oracle won’t let you forget!).
Better yet, talk to us about how you could swap an automatic 4% price rise for a 50% price drop with Support Revolution.
