Strictly looking at Oracle E-business R12, we are seeing so many issues, bugs, and problems that are taking ages to resolve (working with Oracle support), I can't imagine a third party being able to adequately support R12 right now. To me it is sort of a paradox, there are so many problems, only the vendor could possibly try to address them.
I think Steve every organization is different based on their internal support. While bugs are a reason to stay with the software vendor, some orgs have the ability to deal with that internally. I think there will always be a place for many types of support. Thanks for the comment.
Will post Knowledge Infusion beliefs after a few days of collaborating from others