RICS deprecation: what is confirmed, and the Q3 2027 date

There is a lot of noise about RICS right now, and a fair amount of it is ahead of what Oracle has actually said. This is an attempt to separate the two, because the difference matters when you are budgeting.

What Oracle has documented

The Retail Integration Cloud Service documentation landing page carries this notice:

Many components of the Retail Integration Cloud Service (RICS) have been officially scheduled for deprecation, and RICS will no longer receive feature enhancements. RICS will remain available throughout the designated deprecation timelines, but RICS components will be deprecated in phases.

Two things follow from that wording, and both are load-bearing:

1. It is phased, not a switch-off. RICS remains available through the deprecation timelines. Anyone describing this as an imminent shutdown is overstating it.
2. No feature enhancements. Whatever RICS does today is what it will do forever. That is the real constraint — you are on a frozen platform.

The date that actually has teeth

The concrete, dated item in Oracle’s Next Gen Cloud Update guidance is the authentication and protocol cutoff:

SOAP RIB-EXT with Basic Authentication is supported until Q3 of calendar year 2027.

After that, integrations need REST with OAuth 2.0. Oracle’s own guidance adds:

To ensure security compliance and proactively mitigate the risk of business disruption, we strongly advise completing the migration far ahead of the deadline.

Alongside it, in the same Next Gen migration programme:

What is not confirmed

Oracle has not publicly named Oracle Integration Cloud as the replacement for RICS.

This is worth saying plainly, because a good deal of partner marketing states it as settled. It may well turn out to be the answer for many estates — OIC is the obvious candidate and Oracle is clearly steering integration toward it generally. But if you are being sold a “RICS to OIC migration” as though Oracle mandated it, ask to see the Oracle document that says so. As of August 2026 we have not found one.

The practical consequence: do not let a vendor scope you into a specific target platform before you have established what you actually integrate and how.

The phase-by-phase RICS deprecation timeline is published through My Oracle Support rather than the public documentation, so if you hold a support contract, that is where to look for dates specific to your components.

What to do first

Not a migration. An inventory.

Most Oracle Retail integration estates grew rather than being designed, and the documentation rarely matches reality. Before committing to any target platform, you want a list of:

• Every interface in and out of the estate, including the file drops and direct database links that were only ever meant to be temporary
• Which protocol and authentication each one uses today — this is what determines whether the Q3 2027 date applies to it
• Which are Oracle-to-Oracle and which involve a third party, because the third-party ones carry someone else’s timeline
• Message volumes and criticality, so sequencing is driven by risk rather than by whichever team shouts loudest

That inventory is a few weeks of work on a typical estate and it is useful regardless of which direction you eventually go. It is also the artefact that stops you paying for a migration of interfaces you could have retired.

The pre-cutover items people miss

If you are heading into a Next Gen cutover, these come up repeatedly:

• Clear the RIB queues and Error Hospital tables completely. A cutover with unprocessed hospital records is how positions end up wrong on the other side, and reprocessing out of sequence afterwards makes it worse rather than better.
• Strip _CHANGE_ME placeholders from outbound RICS URLs. They appear in the RIB-EXT injector configuration, in RIB-LGF where it points at Logfire WMS, and in RFI where it calls the Financials AccountCombinationService. They are easy to miss and they fail silently until something needs to route.
• Check your source version. Merchandising Next Gen migration requires 19.3.023.2 or later as a prerequisite.
• Budget the window honestly. Oracle documents a 12 to 16 hour production cutover for Merchandising, with Merchandising, RICS and POM all updated together after nightly batch completes.
• Upgrade the RICS Client Connector Pack to match the SaaS version.
• Expect IAM consolidation. If you run multiple IDCS or OCI IAM instances across retail services, they get merged into one, and password resets follow.

Sources

• Oracle Retail Integration Cloud Service documentation
• Merchandising Next Gen Cloud Update Guide
• Oracle Retail documentation index

Verified against Oracle documentation in August 2026. Oracle changes this material, so check the current version before acting on it — and tell us if you find something here that has gone stale.