The hidden cost of not upgrading

The past few weeks have been rough. When I started here I inherited support for a third party program that integrates into the Oracle Apps. The concept of what it does and the service it provides is really cool. I wish my previous job had had this program. The only draw back was that when this program was bought and installed it didn't have all of the features that my new company wanted. That means lots of customizations.

That was 4 years ago for go live, plus a year of development time for the customizations. A Total of 5 years is the version age of the software. 2 years ago a decision on whether to upgrade the product or not came up. The decision was not to upgrade. Each decision comes with a cost. Some are upfront and some are hidden. It's the hidden costs that tend to really cost you.

In the past year we have had to upgrade hardrives, due to running out of storage space. Diagnose OC4J's and the workload passing through them and manually load balancing them. There are 2 issues with the OC4J's memory leak, and the servers ability to handle the workload that they were running on. The Server that the OC4J's were running on had a fatal non recoverable hardware crash. In total about 3 weeks of outage time for 20+ people over the past year. My estimation of cost of extra support, we pay a higher support fee for being on a non-supported version. Outage time for employees, extra hardware costs, extra internal support time, it comes up to almost twice the cost it would have taken to upgrade. Other additional costs that are hard to quantify, can't go to XP SP2, can not upgrade to IE 7, can not use Firefox, OOD issues, Database upgrade issues, lower productivity (reading updates I can expect a 5-10 fold increase in performance when we upgrade).

Now trying to go to Oracle On Demand (OOD) has been an adventure. First, this is an OS platform switch, so all forms, and reports had to be recompiled. Guess what, no source code. Vendor gave us source code to recompile with. It took 3 weeks of trouble shooting to determine that the source code supplied was not the exact version we were on. (Customizations).

At least next year we will get to upgrade.