Two noteworthy articles about Oracle’s cloud strategy were published recently by The Register and Forbes. Forbes posits that Oracle’s tepid revenue growth is due to competing cloud offerings. The work I do puts me in the middle of Oracle-related decisions so my perspective is different. While cloud deals with Amazon and Salesforce.com may be taking a bite out of Oracle, I would argue that a more meaningful dynamic is at play.
Category Archive: Licensing
Oracle Cloud and Declining Revenues
Compliance Risk Mitigation
In my experience, 80% of compliance mistakes fall into five categories. If you avoid these mistakes, then a surprise, expensive true-up is not likely. Therefore, step one in mitigating compliance risk is to become educated on Oracle’s standard policies and any nonstandard terms in your original order documents that would affect entitlement. As a side note, I highly recommend this blog post about contemporaneous agreements.
If you have received an audit letter, then understanding what to expect and how to respond become vitally important. Multiply the feeling of seeing police lights in your rear-view mirror by $millions and you can understand the importance of having a calm, vendor-independent trusted adviser in your corner throughout the process.
Oracle on VMware, Part 4
My friends at iQuate hosted a VMware presentation recently. Click here for the replay.
For those who may remain unclear or recalcitrant, Oracle requires that its software be licensed on every physical core within a cluster of VMware servers. CPU affinity and host affinity are not recognized as limiting factors for licensing. Here’s a fun example: consider a single instance of Oracle Enterprise database running within a VMware farm of 8 servers, each with 4 10-core chips. The licensing requirement is 8 * 4 * 10 * .5 (x86 core factor) * $47,500 (unit list price), or $7.6M in list licensing. That makes for one expensive database, eh! What about pinning that particular virtual machine to a specific couple of cores within a specific machine? Nope. Gotta licensed every core in the farm.
The Year Over Year Cumulative Graph
A powerful moment in my work is when the various options for deploying Oracle are presented from a financial perspective, specifically via Costimizer’s Year Over Year Cumulative graph. A mountain of data is dumped into the tool, resulting in a graph such as this (solution names changed to protect the expensive options).
Introducing the Oracle Costimizer Beta Program
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.
Training for Oracle License Management
I will be speaking at IBSMA’s annual SAM Summit this year, including a five-hour classroom course. See you there!
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. Even so, customers are contractually bound to compliance and Oracle is empowered to throw the book at misuse of its software.
Entitlement and gap analysis is the science of understanding products, quantities, contractual terms and policies. Steps include gathering data, rolling it up into meaningful information, making comparisons between entitlement and deployment, and assessing future growth, among others. This is the heart of Costimizer and the foundation of what I do as a vendor-independent consultant.
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.
Free 30-minute Consultation
You can save $millions in just a short phone call. If that seems like an exaggeration, then consider that a single core’s worth of Oracle software can easily top $100,000 in list license. Add perpetual support payments and lock-in policies and the meter really starts to spin.
How can we reduce operational expenses? Is this a good discount? What is the licensing policy for Solaris virtualization? Should we switch to DB2? Should we sign this ULA? Why is the sky blue? Ask away, and I’ll admit up front that my goal is to be paid for providing good advice through a strategy consulting engagement. Looking forward to your call!
Call (888) 620-9832 or email to inquire about saving money on Oracle via these services:
- 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