Oracle to De-Support Windows 2003 in August 2010

The statement from Oracle is: "Oracle plans to withdraw support for Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2 effective July 13, 2010. JDE E1 8.98.3 is the last supported tools release with Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2003 R2."

This will probably come as a surprise to more than a few Windows shops since W2K3 is still seen as a mainstay of their operations and many organizations had no intention of changing that...until now. 

Microsoft still supports Windows 2003 in extended support, but this means a different thing to Oracle.  For Microsoft, moving a product into extended support simply means that you don't get no-charge incident support, there will be no more design changes nor new features and no more warranty claims.  To Oracle though, the movement of Windows Server 2003 out of mainstream support is cause to withdraw platform support, which apparently means that they may choose not to support your ERP system if it is running on that platform.

Oracle says in their EnterpriseOne Statement of Direction: "The general JD Edwards EnterpriseOne support policy is to withdraw support for a platform component when the vendor withdraws its primary or mainstream support." 

Global Support's statement on the issue is this: "Oracle Global Software Support will still attempt to assist customers running any version of E1 software, even though a customer may be on an older  release of the software, or on an older platform that does not meet our current MTRs, so long as the E1 installation was at the time (even if it is not now) compliant with our MTR certifications."

This is reassuring in that Oracle is not going to completely abandon customers that do not meet current MTR's as long as the EnterpriseOne system was MTR-compliant at one time.

The caveat they offer for withdrawn support is very similar to their support statement concerning virtual machines: "We will try to troubleshoot the issue from the E1 side and verify that the software is configured correctly, but if it gets to the point at which troubleshooting from the E1 side does not resolve the issue, and we cannot reproduce it on a comparable installation which meets our current certifications, then we may need to close an SR with an action plan that you need to upgrade to a currently certified platform for us to continue troubleshooting, if we need to go to Oracle Development."

This means that they will attempt to troubleshoot the item from an E1 perspective while assuming that you are running on an MTR-compliant system.  If they cannot find the issue to be E1-related they will require to you to move to a system that is MTR-compliant in order to move forward.  They also will require you to become compliant if you find an E1 bug and they must go to development.

I suppose that, given the alternative of no support whatsoever for a system that is not (but once was) in compliance, this is not too shabby of a deal.