If you are the CIO of a Mid-Sized Enterprise (ETI) and you use Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS), you are managing a paradox. On the one hand, EBS is the beating heart of your company: robust, proven, and embedding decades of business rules. On the other hand, the infrastructure supporting it is increasingly becoming a technological and financial constraint for your organization.
The technology landscape has changed dramatically, and if your hardware is reaching end of life, you are probably aware that server price increases are expected to range between 15% and 35% by December.
If the question “Should we move to the Cloud?” is now obsolete, the question “When?” has become critical. The answer is increasingly clear: 2026 is the tipping point.
It is the convergence of hardware maintenance cycles, technological maturity, and economic imperatives. Here is why waiting beyond 2026 to migrate your EBS to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) becomes a strategic risk.
1. Hardware renewal: avoid the CapEx trap and gain agility
For many companies, the last major on-premise infrastructure upgrade took place around 2020–2021, often accelerated by the pandemic to support remote work.
By 2026, this hardware will reach end of life (5 years). You are therefore faced with a choice:
- Option A: Reinvest heavily in CapEx for new servers, storage, and cooling (with still-uncertain procurement lead times).
- Option B: Move to OCI under an OpEx model, permanently eliminating hardware management.
The main advantage of the Cloud—and of OCI—lies in elasticity: you no longer size your infrastructure for annual peak loads; you only pay for actual consumption:
- Need to double CPU power for year-end closing? Done in just a few clicks.
- Need to scale down over the weekend to save costs? Fully automatable.
- 2026 bonus: Access to Oracle Database Service on OCI often delivers performance gains of 30 to 50% compared to standard hardware, thanks to the joint engineering of software and hardware (Exadata).
In 2026, budgets are constrained, and tying up cash to acquire servers is no longer the best financial option. Migrating that year allows you to transform a CapEx investment wall into flexible, adjustable operating costs (OpEx).
2. Modernize without disruption
The legitimate fear in any ERP project is service disruption or loss of functionality. Oracle’s strategy for EBS on OCI stands out for its continuity. This is not a re-implementation, but a change of hosting platform:
- Functional equivalence: You keep your current version, your data, and your specific customizations that make your information system valuable.
- User continuity: For business users, interfaces and processes remain unchanged.
- Mature tooling: By 2026, tools such as Oracle EBS Cloud Manager have reached a level of maturity that allows a large part of migration and environment management tasks to be automated (cloning, backups).
An additional advantage is that OCI was designed by Oracle, for Oracle. This is not just a simple lift & shift of virtual machines. By migrating to OCI, you immediately benefit from structural improvements:
- Database performance: Access to Oracle Exadata Cloud Service or Base Database Service delivers performance levels that very few private data centers can match.
- Backup management: Your backups are secured with inter-region replication.
3. The Artificial Intelligence imperative
This is the most strategic argument for 2026. AI is no longer a “nice-to-have”; it is a vital competitive advantage that you must develop.
Keeping your data locked inside an on-premise data center isolates your ERP from modern innovation. By migrating EBS to OCI, you place your data right next to Oracle’s native AI and Machine Learning services.
You can:
- Easily connect OCI Generative AI to your EBS processes.
- Use Oracle Analytics Cloud to extract predictive insights from your historical EBS data without complex network latency.
This enables a progressive modernization, use case by use case, at your own pace.
4. Reduce your TCO (Total Cost of Ownership)
The economic argument is mathematical. Oracle has made migration to OCI financially very attractive for EBS customers:
- Bring Your Own License (BYOL): You reuse your existing licenses on OCI, often with reduced PaaS support costs.
- Lower outbound data costs: OCI offers data transfer pricing (egress fees) significantly lower than those of other hyperscalers.
- Support Rewards: Oracle provides programs where your OCI consumption can reduce your software license support bill.
Studies consistently show a 30 to 50% reduction in TCO after an optimized migration of EBS to OCI compared to staying on-premise, as highlighted in this report by the IDC consulting firm.
5. Cybersecurity: mid-sized enterprises, the new prime targets
While 60% of companies are increasing their cybersecurity investments in response to geopolitical instability (Source), 21% of mid-sized enterprises report having suffered a cyberattack in the past 12 months (Source).
Mid-sized enterprises are now prime targets: they hold valuable data, but rarely have the budget to maintain a cybersecurity team equivalent to that of a CAC 40 group.
On OCI, security is “always on.” Encryption is enabled by default. In addition, with the expansion of Cloud Regions (including EU Sovereign Cloud offerings), you can meet compliance requirements (GDPR) without having to manage the physical complexity of servers.
Conclusion: don’t endure change—take control of it
The year 2026 should not be the year you migrate in an emergency because your hardware has failed or your database version is no longer supported. It should be the year you transform your ERP into a modern, agile, AI-ready platform.
Remaining on-premise after 2026 means choosing to pay more for less performance and less innovation. The path to OCI is now well defined, mature, and secure.
Are you considering a migration to OCI, but unsure which strategy to choose between Lift & Shift, Upgrade & Migrate, and Replatforming?
Consult our decision-maker’s guide to determine the approach best suited to your situation.
