Oracle Support...

A few days ago i spent an evening to become an Oracle Technology Support Champion. Why does Oracle offer such certificates? I think there are many people, who have no glue where to start for getting support and informations about the lifecycle of Oracle products.

For this certificate i had to answer many questions about end of life, premier support, extended support, etc...
Here a short summary:

A very important thing is a metalink account (metalink.oracle.com). It is not for free, you have to purchase support for your Oracle databases, application servers, ...

Oracle provides five years support for their main product from their general availability date (Database, Fusion Middleware, Oracle Applications). This is calles Premier support.
You can extend this support for another three years. (Extended Support)
After that you can buy Sustaining Support (For the details look at the tabular below)

For the details of the Premier Support follow this link.
Oracle says about its support:

more than 14,000 application and technology developers and 7,500 support professionals worldwide
24x7 real-time support with MetaLink—over 1.3 million registered users
Global Support Center Hubs offer proactive support anytime, anywhere, from 18 major hubs on 5 continents
Extensive global reach with support in any of 27 languages
Faster problem resolution with our integrated case-resolution and escalation processes
Knowledgebase of over 400,000 solutions on over 650 products