With companies continuing to expand their global footprint, it makes business sense to expand the technology and application footprint too, so that the complexities associated with globalization are taken care of.

While continued-support issues like non-availability of critical patch updates makes a strong case in itself for the need to upgrade to the latest available Oracle application release available in the market today, I believe the decision to upgrade to a higher release should stem from a more fundamental need like the additional business value that the new functionalities of the latest release promise to deliver.

IT heads are seeing an increase in requests from their users for an upgrade who want to leverage the enhanced functionalities of Oracle R12 and thus gain a better visibility into their mission critical business processes.

With premier Oracle support ending this November and extended support ending the next year, an upgrade makes a compelling case for the Finance teams as well, who would not be very willing enough to spend on extra maintenance packages and at the same time keep the users deprived of the tangible business benefits that the upgrade brings to the table.

For those who are wondering if an upgrade requires a huge upfront investment, you might be interested in reading this.