Third-party premium support is regarded as enabling companies to avoid unnecessary upgrades, offering varying levels of support, supporting custom code, and providing superior support at a lower price than the incumbent vendor.

Third-party support is regarded as including many services not covered by vendors' annual support—such as senior engineers, a superior SLA guaranteeing response within five minutes, and numerous no-additional-cost services—and as also supporting custom code.

Amid pressure to redirect IT spending toward supporting business growth, the view is that funding for this is, in practice, achievable only through reduced maintenance costs.

The view is that third-party premium support allows companies to run existing application releases more reliably and cost-effectively, reallocate funds to growth initiatives, and retain the flexibility to choose the optimal platform in the future.

Rimini Street's third-party maintenance service replaces the vendor's (Oracle's) Premier Support. Existing services such as managed services (MS) remain unchanged at the customer's discretion.