Category Archive: Compliance

Introducing the Oracle Costimizer Beta Program

Categories:

Compliance, Consolidation and Migration, Cost Reduction, Licensing, Maintenance, Software Asset Management

January 30, 2012

I’m looking for beta testers of software that helps organizations reduce the cost of running Oracle.

The Oracle Costimizer is inspired by the reality that most organizations struggle to manage their Oracle assets effectively, let alone set themselves on a path towards savings. Does that remind you of your own organization?

Features of the “Costimizer” include automated compliance analysis, financial modelling of alternative deployments and maintenance renewal discount analysis. It is 100% web-based, cross-browser and drag-and-drop enabled. Both deployment and CSI data may be uploaded via CSV file, and future-state modelling is enabled via the Oracle product catalog and SPECint results for server comparisons.

Please contact me directly for more details on how to participate.

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Entitlement and Gap Analysis

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing, Rational IT Partners

November 22, 2011

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.

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Oracle Helping Customers Attain Software Compliance

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing

February 2, 2011

Oracle began publishing license information manuals for its database with 10gR1 back in 2004. In those days, life was much simpler and the licensing manual was a mere 26 pages.  The latest publication of that manual is 110 pages. Thirty pages of Oracle’s Software Investment Guide regard database-related licensing. Then there’s another 10 pages within a handful of PDFs covering specialty topics such as server partitioning, cloud computing, batching, high availability and disaster recovery. Granted, there is overlap and third-party rights among those 150 slumber-inducing pages of bed-time reading.

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Generic and Proprietary Hosting of Oracle Software

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing

January 31, 2011

Most of the time, customers use Oracle software for internal purposes on servers that reside within their own four walls. Co-locating those servers to a hosting facility makes no difference to Oracle from a contractual perspective. In both cases, standard terms and conditions within Oracle’s license and services agreement are applicable.

On the other end of the spectrum are generic and proprietary hosting arrangements in which the hosting or application vendor licenses the software. In these cases, Oracle requires that non-standard language be added to the order document designating the software to be used for third-parties’ business operations. Proprietary hosting refers to a contractually-designated application such as Salesforce.com. Generic hosting removes this restriction to include any database workload regardless of the application(s) riding on top.

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Oracle Configuration Manager

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing

January 26, 2011

While I’ve intentionally kept this site from becoming a technical resource for database administrators, I make somewhat of an exception with regards to Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM). Everyone from DBA to CFO to security officer should understand the implications of using OCM, which is Oracle’s E.T. phone home script that installs automatically within the database and reports usage metrics back to Oracle. If that doesn’t get your attention, then I recommend reaching out to my friends at Integrigy to understand how OCM may be breaching your company’s security policies.

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