Big Red drops ominous mention of 'Market Driven Support' beyond 2027 - but there's good news for AIX users

Oracle has shocked its customers by releasing new end-of-life conditions for its middleware products that thousands of large organizations rely on in their enterprise application deployments.

In a missive published online earlier this month, Big Red warned that support for the widely used Oracle Fusion Middleware 12c Release 2 was approaching a “critical milestone.” Top-level Premier Support is set to end in December 2026, while Extended Support will stop by the end of December 2027.

“After these dates, Oracle will no longer provide updates or security fixes for this product version. Technical assistance will be provided as defined in the Oracle Lifetime Support Policy. All customers and partners are strongly encouraged to begin planning and executing upgrades or migration strategies to currently supported Oracle Fusion Middleware releases as soon as possible,” the note said.

Martin Biggs, vice president and general manager of third-party support specialist Spinnaker, said users would be concerned about the lack of time to plan for the migration or strategic change to a new platform and to recruit scarce skills.

“That version of Fusion Middleware has been around for quite a while now, and the announcement of Extended Support being only a year is quite unusual — normally it's two to three years. In part, that's because they kept the Premier Support going for so long, and then telling everyone it's going to be managed, ‘Market Driven Support’ after Extended Support is not what the market was expecting,” Biggs said.

In its note, Oracle said that “to help reduce the time sensitivity of these upgrade programs”, it planned to offer a Market Driven Support program for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.2.1.4/12.2.1.19 on a yearly basis beyond 2027. “Details of this program, including scope, terms, and availability, will be communicated at a later date,” the vendor said.

Biggs described Market Driven Support — a fee-based service which offers a lower level of support than Premier or Extended Support — as an “extraordinarily limited product” which does not provide full patching.

“The situation right now is you've got so many security vulnerabilities being announced all the time, who knows what Market-Driven Support is going to include? They're basically saying, when it comes to January 2028, it's unclear what they’re going to do. By the way, Market Driven Support is far more expensive for a far weaker support product. That's the big surprise to the marketplace,” Biggs said.

The Register has offered Oracle the opportunity to comment.

The good news is that Oracle is broadening platform support by confirming future versions of Oracle WebLogic Server and Oracle Fusion Middleware will be available on IBM's AIX Unix operating system for its mid-range POWER processor architecture.

The move would offer “a more deliberate approach to modernization, allowing upgrades to be aligned with infrastructure lifecycle planning, application dependencies and business-driven transformation timelines,” IBM said in a statement.

Oracle has also promised more details — at some point in the future — about its plans for Fusion Middleware.

It plans to deliver the next Oracle Fusion Middleware suite release on a Jakarta EE 11-based container [for Java-based applications]. "This release is intended to extend support for the next generation of Java and WebLogic Server capabilities across the broader Fusion Middleware portfolio,” it said. ®