What is Oracle Support Maintenance Rewards?

In-Depth Answer

The program itself is simple enough as this YouTube overview highlights. As mentioned elsewhere, however, Oracle is a support collection agency that dabbles in software and cloud services. Viewed properly under this lense, Oracle Support Rewards may be a mechanism to (further) lock customers into paying annual support while over-spending on cloud services.

We are certainly in favor of reducing annual software support fees! But, two questions must be answered to expose whether the rewards program is a commercially-advisable mechanism to do so.

First, are your annual support fees optimized? If not, then the program’s value is eroded by applying rewards to poorly-priced or unnecessary support. Second, are your OCI credits priced optimally? We’ve seen Oracle improve upon standard discounting for OCI; conversely, we’ve seen Oracle lower the discount for OCI when the rewards program is in play.