I will be speaking at IBSMA’s annual SAM Summit this year, including a five-hour classroom course. See you there!
Call (888) 620-9832 or email to inquire about saving money on Oracle via:
- Free 30-minute Consultation
- Asset Discovery
- Entitlement and Gap Analysis
- Compliance Risk Mitigation
- Software Asset Management
- Architecture and Design
- TCO Modeling
- Consolidation and Migration Planning
- Vendor Negotiation
- Training and Workshops
The Problem
Oracle software fees are among the largest line items within many IT budgets. Managing and reducing these costs is complicated by a labyrinth of contractual terms, software licensing policies, technical concepts, service level agreements and business practices.
The Solution
A vendor-independent facilitator with the processes, tools and experience necessary to merge best practices from software asset management, procurement and contracts, engineering and operations.
The Result
Savings. And where short-term cost reduction isn’t possible, you will be on a path towards flexible contracts, market-leading discounts, improved asset management and rationally-engineered systems.
Entitlement and Gap Analysis
Software licensing is both remarkably simple and immeasurably complex. Just like Calculus can be broken down into elementary steps, so too licensing is simple math stacked up over decades of disparate metrics and contractual terms. The bad news is that customers are contractually bound to compliance, and Oracle is empowered to throw the book at defiant misuse of its software.
On the one hand, software entitlement is the science of understanding quantities, contractual terms and policies. On the other hand, licensing is an art that necessitates skillful use of timing, negotiation and knowledge of Oracle’s internal culture. Simply stated, your leverage is dependent on knowing what is licensed and deployed, the gaps therein and an appropriate balance between the art and science of compliance.
Architecture and Design
It’s difficult (i.e. nearly impossible) to save money on Oracle without changing how you’ve deployed its products. License-friendly scenarios for consolidation, virtualization, high availability, disaster recover, tier-ing to Standard Edition, outsourcing, cloud, etc., must be seriously considered for future-state. This is especially true after a decade of marketing against expensive UNIX machinery towards adoption of extra-cost Enterprise Edition options designed for Lintel pizza boxes.
Oracle is smarter than to let its customers simply reshuffle annual maintenance fees, cancel/rebuy expensive contracts, negotiate multi-year support in exchange for better discounts, etc. The bottom line is that Oracle doesn’t need to offer or allow any of this. In other words, saving money on Oracle is hard work and requires someone with technical experience to create alternatives that reduce costs without risking business continuity.
TCO Modeling
A vital step in any major IT decision is financial analysis. Unfortunately, many organizations wait to assess cost until after weeks or even months of technical brainstorming and a sky-as-the-limit holiday wish list of expensive technology. This becomes precarious when your Oracle sales person submits a large forecast entry, thereby initiating a locomotive-like passion within Oracle to ensure that you actually buy the software.
In reality, there are a finite number of deployment strategies for Oracle, including high availability and disaster recovery. Combined with predictable vendor discounting and an experienced analyst, it is possible to determine what each strategy means for your organization from a cost perspective. The following costs can and should be comprehensively modeled, preferably in the beginning of an Oracle-related infrastructure project: initial capital, year-two operations, three-year TCO, year-over-year operations, payback period and “bang for buck”, among others.