Continue reading »]]> There is no doubt that Enterprise Edition Database offers superior functionality that many applications and administrators shan’t live without. I wrote about this nearly two years ago when UNIX manufacturers started dropping prices and core counts increased across all chip types, including IBM Power7.

Well, I recently created a financial comparison between Enterprise and Standard that seemed worth sharing. It bears repeating that Standard Edition is license-able on servers with a maximum capacity of four sockets. To my knowledge, Oracle has not limited the total number of cores across those four chips (since it licensed per chip), nor hamstrung Standard Edition under the hood to under-utilize all available cores.

In my example, consider 400 cores across 10 servers, each with 4 10-core chips. Licensed as Enterprise Edition, this would total nearly $10M in list licensing. If, instead, we deploy Standard Edition on four of those servers, our list licensing is just shy of $6M. Either deal is huge and would be awarded a discount of at least 65%, so we can extrapolate that deploying Standard Edition on 40% of those 400 cores saves about $3.3M over a five-year time frame.

I’m just sayin’.

Continue reading »]]> 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.

Continue reading »]]> Here’s what I’ve learned after being in the Oracle food-chain for 15 years and advising 100s of clients on Oracle software licensing: license what you need, when you need it, when Oracle is ready to negotiate.

Said differently, it’s hard to out-Oracle Oracle. The reality is that large vendors such as Oracle employ highly-paid smart people to mitigate risk and maximize earnings. The temptation to buy more, buy forward, etc., is based on the potentially irrational belief that there is such a thing as a once-in-a-lifetime deal.

This is, of course, a wild simplification of concepts within architecture and design, software asset management and vendor negotiation, but it’s worth keeping in mind as a general principle.

On that note, Happy Thanksgiving!

Continue reading »]]> 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.