One of the most common risk gaps during the lifecycle of Oracle at the enterprise is a lack of alignment. Legacy systems or architectural systems may cost extra in support year after year, but a simple change to the architecture may reduce your support costs. To give you an example, if you have older servers with single core processors and you move to a multi-core environment, you can usually save significant money in your licensing and your annual support costs. Let’s assume a server that had four single-core processors on it licensed singularly, roughly $47,500 for a single CPU license that would be $190,000 ($47,500 X 4 processors). Add 3-years of annual support for another $125,400. So, roughly, your cost of ownership would be $315,400. If on the other hand, you had employed a multi-core environment and used Intel CPUs, there is a factor that is applied in the Oracle licensing which is one-half, so you only need to buy half the licenses for the total number of cores that you have. For the same number of cores, you would be paying exactly half as much. In a three year period, you would save roughly $157,700 which may very well justify going to a different architecture.
Auto renewal on your maintenance and support agreements need to be closely monitored. It is better that you leave the auto-renewal alone, so that you are in a better position to renegotiate each year. It’s at this point that the lack of a central repository or tracking mechanism may become really obvious because without knowing throughout the year when the renewals are coming in, it becomes difficult to budget and it can get you into trouble. It’s important to note that within agreements of Oracle, support renewals may contain their own Terms and Conditions which may alter some of the Terms and Conditions that you fought so hard to negotiate within the original ordering document. It’s really important that you factor in these support renewals and the support costs during the procurement process and scrutinize those during the support renewals. You could end up thinking that this is just a purchasing exercise of support renewal year to year when you actually may be devaluing that big investment you made.
Contract analysis is a crucial part of managing your Oracle licensing agreements. While many IT managers are accustomed to just ordering licenses online and calling it a day, there is much more to the process in order to get the best ROI. Oracle licenses can vary a great deal especially based on when you bought your licenses. Oracle, in fact, is trying very hard to standardize their licensing with both their older and newer client base.The newer licensing agreements may favor Oracle, which is why it’s very important to review your SLAs to ensure that you are not signing away important rights and privileges you had previously. You also must be aware of what your business needs are and how they have changed since you signed the original SLA, for example, if you require more licenses than you did the three years before when you signed the agreement with Oracle.
During new discounts and promotion, there is an opportunity to benefit from reviewing the needs of the enterprise, your Terms & Conditions and possibly initiate a contract re-negotiation.
Successful contract license management is a key factor in remaining in compliance.
Here are the key steps in the process:
·Forecasting – looking at what is needed and getting the necessary approval. In this step you must also be sure that your licensing meets your architecture.
·Negotiation – Go in and negotiate with your vendor, this can be done at anytime and the process will vary depending on what you need.
·Repository – Update, update, update! Be sure to continuously update your repository to be sure that you are in compliance. The repository will give you the foundation for determining whether you are in compliance and give you the centralized database that everybody in the company who has their hand in it will know what is going on. A thorough repository will also keep you prepared should you face an audit.
One of the big benefits of having a repository, an inventory of your licensing, is to better leverage the flexibility of your license types.
We here at Miro live and breathe Oracle, so we often wonder, for those of us who have not been there, what exactly do the Oracle offices look like? To ease our curiosities, we obtained some photos and just for fun, thought we would share them with all of you! Enjoy!
We get a lot of questions about Oracle’s processor core factors. Core factors can change and this is particularly difficult when you’re the person in charge of tracking changes in licensing or the procurement process. Case and point, the Sun UltraSPARC T2+ core processor licensing changed from 0.75 to 0.50. As soon as the change is in effect, your organization is considered out of compliance.
See Oracle Processor Core Factor Table, which charts vendor and core processor licensing factors. Changes can be found as a footnote at the bottom of the page.
One of the most common risk gaps during the lifecycle of Oracle at the enterprise is a lack of alignment. Legacy systems or architectural systems may cost extra in support year after year, but a simple change to the architecture may reduce your support costs. To give you an example, if you have older servers with single core processors and you move to a multi-core environment, you can usually save significant money in your licensing and your annual support costs. Let’s assume a server that had four single-core processors on it licensed singularly, roughly $47,500 for a single CPU license that would be $190,000 ($47,500 X 4 processors). Add 3-years of annual support for another $125,400. So, roughly, your cost of ownership would be $315,400. If on the other hand, you had employed a multi-core environment and used Intel CPUs, there is a factor that is applied in the Oracle licensing which is one-half, so you only need to buy half the licenses for the total number of cores that you have. For the same number of cores, you would be paying exactly half as much. In a three year period, you would save roughly $157,700 which may very well justify going to a different architecture. 
