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.
Tag Archive: save money on oracle
How to License Oracle Software
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.
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, downgrading 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.
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!
Oracle Public Cloud
Oracle has yet to publish the fees and terms associated with moving database workloads into its cloud offering, announced one month ago at OOW. The landing page looks good at least.
Anyone familiar with Oracle’s profit model should be wondering if signing up for database cycles from the cloud will facilitate re-licensing. That is, will customers be able to terminate products on traditional support in exchange for a cloud-centric licensing model like Amazon’s EC2?
Skip VMware? Oracle on VMware, Part 3
I was reminded this morning that the key to saving money on software is to reduce your need for it. Said differently, executives overseeing IT spend should be asking the following question: why aren’t improvements to hardware, adoption of low-cost x86 servers, cloud computing, fill-in-the-blank-latest-whatever, resulting in overall savings?
As complex as the topic may be, there is one simple truth: vague, undocumented and otherwise overwhelmingly complex software licensing policies have the potential to dictate IT decisions.
The Fundamentals of Saving Money on Oracle
There are fundamentally three concepts to consider when attempting to save money on Oracle: total cores, software editions and contractual flexibility. Let’s take a quick look at each.
First, most organizations have multiples of more cores deployed than they need to adequately serve the business. It follows that underutilized compute resources comprise the majority of cost and waste within IT. This is especially true considering that Oracle requires licensing for any core that it can land on, regardless of how well utilized it is.
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