Ingres Support Policy
Overview
Ingres Corporation utilizes an open source business model that provides customers the flexibility of a subscription service with enterprise ready products. The subscription model allows customers to only pay for the product support and services for the time they use the product versus a more legacy license approach to software purchases. This business model allows Ingres to be more responsive to customer needs and provides faster product and service innovation to the marketplace. One such example is the Ingres Service Network. Ingres Service Network is an innovative way to provide value added services and support to our customers.
Thank you for choosing Ingres Support. This document is here to help our customers to better understand the Ingres Support Policies and better utilize Ingres Support. These policies apply to all Ingres product lines, unless otherwise noted.
Ingres Support Levels
Severity Definitions
Information Customers Need When Requesting Support
Contact Information
Updates and Changes
General
Support Fees
Support Fees are due and payable annually in advance of a support term, unless otherwise stated in the relevant ordering document.
Support Period
Support is effective upon the signature of your Order unless stated otherwise in your Order. Once ordered, all Support Services, and Support Fees, are non-cancelable and non-refundable. Ingres is not obligated to provide Support Services beyond the end of the term indicated in your Order unless you renew your Support Services on or before the expiration date by agreement between Ingres and you.
Subscription
An active subscription includes the use of the licensed product and Enterprise Support during the term. A subscription that is not renewed at the end of the term will be considered expired, and customer will discontinue all use of the software and Support Services.
Support for Perpetual Licenses
When acquiring Support Services for a perpetual license, all licenses of the same product must be supported under an active Ingres Support contract. You may not support only a subset of licenses of the same product; those licenses left unsupported must be terminated. With respect to Ingres Support Services in relation to perpetual licenses, you hereby represent that you have the appropriate licenses to the Software that is subject to the Support Services. Perpetual Licenses are to be utilized for customers that have not yet upgraded to the new Ingres subscription model.
Reinstatement of Ingres Support for Perpetual Licenses
When Support Services lapse on a perpetual license, it can be reinstated by paying all of the back support due for the unsupported period, plus support for one year going forward, unless agreed otherwise between Ingres and you. Unsupported licenses are not eligible for Updates, Enterprise Support, or any other Ingres services.
Designated Contacts
The customer employees designated by you in writing to Ingres to be the sole contacts between you and Ingres Support are the “Designated Contacts”. You agree that each of your Designated Contacts must be knowledgeable of Ingres products and support.
Product Updates
"Update" means a minor update to the Software which Ingres generally makes available to its supported customers, bug fixes, patches, and service packs.
Right to Accelerate Product Support Lifecycle
Ingres may shorten the term of Enterprise support for certain products and versions at its discretion. Ingres will make commercially reasonable efforts to announce any change in lifecycle length at least 12 months in advance. These notices are subject to change, and will be updated as necessary.
User
As used in Ingres's price list, "User" is an individual with the appropriate license rights, and authorized by customer, to use the Ingres products which are installed on a single server or multiple servers, regardless of whether the individual is actively using the products at any given time.
Processor
As used in Ingres's price list, "Processor" means all processors where the Ingres products are installed and/or running.
Machine
As used in Ingres's price list, a "Machine" shall mean the Software is licensed to the entire computer or server, which is a single serial number machine, with no limitations placed on the number of Processors.
Ingres Support Levels
Product Support Lifecycle Policy
This policy explains Ingres Corporation's product support lifecycle policy. Whether purchased directly from Ingres, or from Ingres partners or resellers, these policies are designed to standardize product lifecycle expectancies and assist you in developing your internal release implementation and migration plans. Ingres Corporation strives to provide the best quality Software and Support Services. In order to provide best in class software solutions, Ingres has defined a predictable Product Support Lifecycle Policy to give you plenty of lead-time to plan and manage your upgrade and release processes.
Lifecycle Phases
Ingres provides distinct product development phases and synchronized product support lifecycle offerings. By understanding these phases, you are better able to plan for your software support needs and your migration timeframes. The term General Availability (GA) is key to understanding each lifecycle phase and starts the clock.
Product Lifecycle Stages
| Lifecycle Stage | Term |
| General Availability | Years 1-5 |
| Extended Availability | Years 6-10 |
| Obsolescence | Years 11+ |
Standard Product Support Offerings
| Support Offering | Product Lifecycle Stage | Length of Offering | Planning Term |
| Enterprise Support | General Availability | 5 Years | 5 Years |
| Extended Support | Extended Availability | 5 Years | 10 Years |
| Obsolescence Support | Obsolescence | 5 Years | 15 Years |
- GA status is:
- Achieved when a product is available for purchase or production upgrade
- The most current release of your Ingres product
Any policy exceptions to the duration would be provided through additional notification through Ingres support service delivery infrastructure.
Enterprise Support
Enterprise Support includes:
| IT Service Process | Description |
| 24x7 Incident Management | Create Service Requests to engage Ingres support personnel via Phone or the Online Service Desk to manage service disruptions. |
| 24x7 Problem Management | Create Service Requests via Phone or the Online Service Desk to solve problems with Ingres product including configuration issues, usage questions and issues, and errors in a release. |
| 24x7 Online Service Management | Access our customer support site to manage your Service Requests, search the extensive Ingres knowledgebase, determine supported product configurations, product documentation, and more. |
| Collaborative Support | You can engage our expert Ingres Customer Support Engineers to diagnose and troubleshoot your issue through our secure virtual desktop sharing solution. |
| Release Management | Access subscribed Updates as they are released. |
| Change Management | Access engineers and knowledge specifically targeted to help you manage your application systems through change including migration to Ingres, upgrades within Ingres, patching to stable and supportable levels, and even integration with other products where relevant. |
| Configuration Management | Access to engineers and knowledge that assist you in installing and configuring your Ingres software for optimal stability, manageability, availability and productivity. |
Enterprise Support is available for every new Ingres product release during the General Availability lifecycle phase.
Extended Support
Extended Support is available from year 5 after a major version is released to year 10 after GA release. There is an additional charge for this level of support. Extended Support is the same as Enterprise Support with the following exception:
| IT Service Process | Description |
| 24x7 Problem Management | Create Service Requests via the Online Service Desk to solve problems with Ingres product including configuration issues, usage questions and issues, and known errors with available fixes in a release. |
Obsolescence Support
Years 11 and beyond: This phase indicates that the standard support offering has expired and as such, telephone support will not be available and code fixes will no longer be developed. Best effort online support and access to existing releases and their software updates is available for 5 years through Obsolescence Support.
Third Party Dependencies and the Product Support Lifecycle
As operating systems and technologies are retired by their respective vendors Ingres will provide an IT planning roadmap as soon as possible to help you plan your next move. Ingres will continue to provide Incident Management, Change Management and other support functions to the best of our internal capabilities, but issues concerning Problem Management and Configuration Management around new components will be restricted to the current knowledge and known work-arounds. Ingres reserves the right to announce a discontinuance of maintenance and support on platforms and database applications to coincide with the vendor's standard support policy.
Severity Definitions
Support issues may be submitted either electronically or via telephone. To ensure that we treat your issue with the appropriate level of significance, when raising an issue, you are responsible to accurately assign a severity level. The following table provides some guidance as to how the severity should be defined.
Severity 1: “System Down” or “Product Inoperative” condition. Your production use is stopped or so severely impacted that you cannot reasonably continue work
Severity 2: High impact business condition. Important features are unavailable with no acceptable workaround. Operations can continue in a restricted fashion.
Severity 3: Low impact business condition. The impact is an inconvenience, which may require workaround to restore functionality.
Severity 4: Question about product use or implementation. There is no impact on the operation of the software.
Severity 5: Reserved for tracking proactive support work done as part of Premium Services engagements.
When you have a Severity 1 incident, we want to work on your Severity 1 incident until it is resolved. To that end, your technical team must also be available 24 hours a day so that any further documentation required to continue work can be obtained, and to provide further information and assistance. If your technical team is not available to provide the required documentation, information or assistance, the severity of the incident may be downgraded to a Severity 2, and shall remain downgraded until all required documentation, information, and assistance is provided. Ingres's assistance with resolution of an incident is contingent on your team's cooperation and assistance.
Impact Assignment
You are responsible for submitting issues with an assigned impact level to help Ingres assess priority. You should assign impact levels accurately to reflect the impact the problem is having on your business
Critical: The issue has a very high priority on your business and requires immediate attention.
Normal: The issue has a normal priority
Support Response Times by Severity
Severity 1: 1 hour 24X7
Severity 2: 2 hours during business hours
Severity 3: 4 hours during business hours
Severity 4: End of business day
Severity 5: N/A
*Reasonable efforts will be made to respond to customer-submitted issues per the above guidelines.
Information Customers Need When Requesting Support
The following information should be provided:
- Your company name and six-character site ID for Enterprise Support or Extended Support program:
- Name of the product
- Release of the product
- Service Pack (SP) of the product (e.g. maintenance level)
- Fixes applied above the base product or Service Pack
- Operating system (OS):
- OS release and SP
- Language of the OS (if applicable)
- Fixes applied to the OS or SP
- Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) software:
- Name and vendor of OEM software
- Releases of OEM software including SP
- What were you trying to accomplish?
- What is the business impact of the problem?
- Which environment is affected (e.g. production, test, or development)?
- Describe the incident in detail:
- Specific steps taken and results
- Entire error messages received
- Is it reproducible?
- Is it intermittent?
- Is there any pattern to when it occurs?
- What else was happening on the system prior to the incident or during the incident?
- Did this ever work?
- Is the incident occurring on one machine or on multiple machines?
- Does this work on any machines in your enterprise?
- Has anything changed recently in your environment that could have triggered the problem?
- Hardware
- OS software
- Application software
- Network configurations
Contact Information
Contact information by country can be found on our support contacts page.
Updates and Changes
The Ingres Support Policies may be updated from time to time and are subject to change at Ingres's discretion; provided however, Ingres's service commitments per its Support Policies will not be materially reduced as compared to the Ingres Support Policies in effect at the start of your support term (typically one year) during the then-current support term.
