If P6 licensing, support, and maintenance feels confusing, you are not alone. Many organizations quietly admit they are unsure what they are paying for, whether they are compliant, or if they are overpaying for licenses they do not actually need.
As an Oracle Primavera Sell Partner specializing in Primavera P6, CBA spends a lot of time untangling this confusion and turning it into a clear, actionable strategy for our clients. We are not just resellers; we are practitioners who implement, support, and optimize P6 environments every day.
What P6 Maintenance Really Is
When you purchase a perpetual P6 license, the license cost gives you the right to use the software indefinitely, and the annual “Support and Maintenance” fee gives you the right to keep that software current and supported. That annual fee is typically around 22% of the license price and includes access to Oracle Support (online and phone), bug fixes, security patches, and version upgrades.
You pay for the license and the first year of support and maintenance upfront, then you are responsible for renewing Support and Maintenance each year for as long as you want those benefits. The core concept is simple—but in practice, especially in large or fastgrowing organizations, it becomes anything but simple without a strategy.
Why It Feels So Confusing
The confusion usually starts when licenses are bought one at a time, at different times of the year, often by different departments or project teams. Maintenance invoices then show up on different dates, for different CSI#s (Customer Support Identifiers), and quickly turn into a stack of unrelated renewals that are easy to ignore or delay.
At the same time, Oracle’s portfolio now includes subscriptionbased SaaS products like Oracle Primavera Cloud (OPC) that do not require traditional maintenance, which makes it even harder to understand what you are paying for and why. CBA’s role is to act as the “lighthouse in the storm” and bring all of this together into one coherent picture of your options, costs, and risks.
Perpetual Licensing vs Cloud Subscription
Support and Maintenance is only charged when you purchase a “perpetual” license, which you host on your laptop, server, or a thirdparty hosting provider. If you are buying Oracle Primavera Cloud or a P6 Cloud Subscription, you are paying a recurring subscription for access to Oracle’s hosted environment instead of a perpetual license plus maintenance.
Perpetual licenses are a higher upfront investment but can be more costeffective over the long term, especially for organizations planning to use P6 for many years. Cloud subscriptions often have a lower upfront cost and reduce IT overhead, but can be more expensive over a long timeframe if not managed strategically. CBA helps clients evaluate not just price, but also governance, risk, and longterm scalability when choosing between these paths.
How Maintenance Is Invoiced (And How To Simplify It)
Whenever you purchase a set of licenses, Oracle assigns a CSI# (Customer Support Identifier) to that transaction, and all of the support and maintenance for those licenses will renew together under that CSI. If you buy more licenses later, you receive additional CSI#s, each with its own renewal date and invoice stream.
If this has already happened in your organization, you can ask Oracle to prorate maintenance across your CSI#s so that they align to the same renewal date and become much easier to manage. CBA routinely helps clients consolidate and align renewals to create a single, predictable maintenance event rather than a constant drip of invoices and lastminute decisions.
Hidden Risks of Letting Maintenance Lapse
The obvious benefit of maintenance is that you always have access to the latest version of P6, as well as Oracle Support and the patches that fix known issues. The less obvious—but more costly—impact shows up when maintenance is allowed to lapse for months or years.
If you let your annual maintenance lapse, Oracle typically requires you to “catch up” on missed payments before you can regain support, access upgrades, or download new versions. In some cases, if you go long enough without renewing, catching up on maintenance can cost more than simply buying new licenses, and Oracle may have the right to expire licenses or require a migration with backdated support.
The Project Delivery Impact
From a project delivery standpoint, outofdate or unsupported P6 environments eventually turn into real project costs and delays. For example:What-is-P6-Maintenance-and-why-you-need-it_blog.docx
- Clients may demand schedules produced on a newer version of P6 than the one your team can currently support, forcing urgent upgrades under unfavorable conditions.
- Schedulers can waste man hours troubleshooting errors that would have been resolved by patches or version upgrades already available to supported customers.
- When multiplied across a portfolio of projects and users, these impacts dwarf the cost of staying current on maintenance. CBA helps clients model this risk so that the maintenance decision is made on data, not on gut feel or shortterm budget pressure.
How CBA Adds Strategic Value
Rather than treating P6 maintenance as a “necessary evil,” CBA helps turn it into a controlled, predictable part of your project controls strategy. Typical ways CBA supports clients include:
License and CSI assessment: Inventorying licenses, CSI#s, and renewal dates so you have a complete, accurate picture of your P6 assets.
Renewal and consolidation strategy: Working with you and Oracle to align renewals, reduce administrative overhead, and avoid surprise invoices or lastminute decisions.
Upgrade roadmaps: Designing upgrade plans that align with project milestones, IT windows, and training needs, rather than reacting to emergencies.
Cloud vs onprem evaluation: Providing scenariobased advice on when to stay on perpetual licenses, when to move to Oracle Primavera Cloud, and how to run hybrid environments without compliance gaps.
This is where CBA’s deep specialization in Primavera and project controls becomes a real differentiator: the licensing and maintenance conversation is always tied back to project delivery, risk, and ROI—not just software line items.
Next Steps
If you suspect there are gaps in how your P6 environment is licensed, supported, or managed, now is the best time to get ahead of the issue rather than waiting for an audit, a critical outage, or a musthave upgrade.
CBA can quickly review your current licenses, maintenance status, and deployment plans, then provide an actionable roadmap that covers P6 maintenance, upgrades, hosting options, and potential transitions to Oracle Primavera Cloud. If you have questions or think you may have Support and Maintenance issues that need to be addressed, reach out to CBA lets schedule a 20 minute assessment where we can not just evaluate this item but other project management and project controls related processes to make sure your business is running full steam ahead.