Oracle has an “All or Nothing” policy towards technical support of their products. This policy, known as matching service levels, means that you can either maintain the same level of support across all licenses of a license set (i.e. Database and Options) or maintain no support across all licenses, but nothing in between, such as maintaining support only on the licenses that are currently in use. If you choose to drop support on a quantity of existing licenses, Oracle will require that you terminate the unsupported licenses in order to comply with their “all or nothing” matching service levels policy. License termination means you do not have the option to reinstate the license or support, you would need to repurchase licensing if required in the future.
The most common situation we see is with customers that have multiple support contracts/renewals for database licensing they have acquired over the years. This frequently results in situations where a customer is over-licensed for a specific product or option. Customers have the choice to either continue to pay support on the extra licensing or cancel support and terminate the extra licensing.
There are additional considerations for making the decision on how to best utilize your existing investment in Oracle licensing. For example, if you choose to terminate a subset of an existing support contract (i.e. terminate half of the licensing on an individual renewal), Oracle may reprice the remaining support to offset the savings of the terminated support. The best case scenario would be to terminate the complete renewal (if necessary and viable). Cintra specializes in helping our customers understand all of their options and the pros and cons of each approach.
Here’s the excerpt from Oracle’s support policies that covers Matching Service Levels:
Matching Service Levels When acquiring technical support, all licenses in any given license set must be supported under the same technical support service level (e.g., Software Update License & Support, Oracle Communications Network Premier Support or unsupported). If you add Extended Support, you still must maintain Software Update License & Support for the entire license set; subject to availability, you must acquire Extended Support for all licenses of a particular version release of a program if you acquire Extended Support for any license in such version release. You may not support a subset of licenses within a license set; the license set must be reduced by terminating any unsupported licenses. You will be required to document license terminations via a termination letter.
Oracle's complete technical support policy can be found here (this clause is on page 3)
http://www.oracle.com/us/support/library/057419.pdf
About Cintra
Cintra is a Global Oracle Platinum Partner with offices in New York City, Dublin, Ireland, and Bristol, UK. We were awarded Oracle’s Global Database Partner of the year for 2011 and Oracle’s North American Partner of the Year for the Database Appliance for 2012. We are consistently ranked among Oracle’s top Value Added Resellers.
Cintra’s Oracle License and Support Review Services serve as a friendly audit of our customers’ Oracle deployments and enable customers the make informed decisions to maintain Oracle License Compliance at the lowest possible cost. For more information on Cintra’s licensing services and Oracle implementation and Remote DBA services, please visit http://www.cintra.com or email Seth Feeley sfeeley@cintra.com