While Oracle’s business is built on great products, their success is equally due to their innovative support policies. These policies are often disadvantageous for customers because they can eliminate flexibility and the potential to reduce support spend in the future. Although Oracle’s strategy around support is comprised of a number of policies and terms, perhaps the most powerful, and the most difficult for customers to grasp, is the support repricing policy.

The Support Repricing Policy Defined

When customers buy Oracle software on a single order, those licenses are given a Customer Support Identifier (CSI). The CSI is akin to a social security number that is forever associated with the licenses.  Another separate license order would be assigned its own distinct CSI, and so on. For a given CSI, Oracle’s repricing policy dictates that when some, but not all, licenses are de-supported, the support for the remaining licenses is repriced at list price (as long as this doesn’t exceed what the customer was previously paying). In short, this policy makes it difficult for customers to save money when their Oracle requirements decrease, and safeguards Oracle’s support revenue without regard to the practical value customers are receiving.

SOURCE: softwareone.com