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.
