Charles Phillips announced today at Collaborate 09 that Extended Support fees would be waived for the PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 releases through June 2011. Extended support adds about 10% to the Premier Support, so that'll bring a bit of relief to IT budgets.
I believe that Extended Support is for products that have been released for five years or more. It's interesting that after five years release 8.9 is only one release back from being current. From a consulting perspective it's been nice to relax a bit from the biennial task of getting up to speed on a new release, but I have to wonder if PeopleSoft customers are getting as much value from their support dollars as they used to. Either way I think Oracle is doing the right thing by not charging extra for supporting this not-so-outdated release.