Taking Risks and Saving Money with Third-Party Support

Want to save hundreds of thousands of dollars? Third-party support, an underappreciated option, achieves significant cost saving and potentially better service for your major software products than publishers like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce. However, going to a third party usually has tradeoffs that your institution needs to accept. You may be giving up rights to future software releases or security fixes. The University System of New Hampshire has moved to third-party support for some products, especially our Oracle database licenses. We will share our journey as we learned about this space, the mistakes we almost made, the benefits we received, and what we have had to give up. It took us well over a year of learning about our Oracle license situation, exploring options to reduce costs with Oracle, and understanding what third-party support would and would not do for us before we made the change. Come find out if the risk is worth it in your situation.