Without a comprehensive and effective Service Level Agreement (SLA) in place when purchasing hardware or software, your investment runs the risk of being ineffective, and/or costing more than originally planned. The key to a successful SLA is all about the details. The four components of an SLA should be:

Without these four components, your SLA will not be successful. Each component must be well defined and agreed upon by both parties. The key is to look at this as a shared document, for both the vendor and purchaser to share in success or failure of the project.

Microsoft and the Linux Foundation have recently teamed up against the American Law Institute (ALI). These two parties, who have a reputation of always being on opposite sides, have joined forces and sent a joint letter to the ALI regarding their concerns with the group’s draft Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. They both believe the new Principles will do more harm than good and should be revised.

Their main concern is a non-disclaimable “implied warranty of no material hidden defects”, as they feel this would have a negative impact on free and open source software and undermine the sharing of software. It would open the software industry up to unnecessary litigation. We agree that this could get sticky, and when these two parties come together, you know they mean business.

The ALI committee meets this week to firm up the Principles. Let’s hope they give the industry a bit more time and caution before finalizing!

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

In case you missed the Larry Ellison interview by Reuters’ Jim Finkle about Sun Micro, you should spend 5 minutes with it. It’s worth the read and gives quite a bit of insight. Q&A - What are Larry Ellison’s plans for Sun Micro.

Miro has been a supporter of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society for years. Again, Miro sponsored and raised funds for Team Joe at this year’s NJ Bike-a-thon. As you see, Eliot (Miro’s president is on the extreme left) and some of our sales folks took a photo after the bike ride.

The ending of a financial quarter or year-end have been traditionally good times to review and re-up software licensing agreements. Though not always the case, it is still a time when many SLAs are reviewed and discussed between the corporate enterprise and the software vendor. Dependent on the degree of concessions and “value-add” placed into your contract, the timing will make a difference. We’ve been encouraging many of our clients to begin reviewing their Oracle and Microsoft assets and SLAs now so that any contract discussions can begin before the mad rush. Our experience is that last-minute SLA discussions will often lead to a missed opportunity for savings for a variety of reasons.

I’ve been talking a little bit about how to have SLA discussions in tough economic times on my here. We’d love to hear about your experience. Drop us a note sometime.

Incident Server Support will no longer be offered for purchase by Oracle starting with the next Oracle fiscal year. However, clients will be able to renew packages already in place, but no new support contracts will be written after this June.

While Incident Server Support does not replace a comprehensive support and maintenance program or include updates, it does offer an alternative, cost effective solution for technical support. It is available only in conjunction with the Premier Support for Oracle licensing. The Incident Server Support Package includes:

While Incident Server Support is not available for E-Business, it is available for:

If you have an Incident Support contract and will be using it in the coming months, renew it for you. If you don’t currently have Incident Support, but would like to purchase it, please contact us no later than June.

Remember to discuss any potential changes with Miro Consulting prior to executing any changes through implementation or purchase. Miro can help identify the total licensing impact of any changes and work with Oracle to provide the lowest cost of ownership solution for your organization.

If you’re saying “huh?”, that’s not a good sign. Contract lifecycle management - similar in nature to software asset management and is, in fact, part of SAM - is the practice of managing a software license agreement contract from initiation through award to compliance and renewal. You need a good system in place to ensure that deliverables and milestones are reached based on contractual obligations. By having a solid process in place - whether you partner with an expert matter consultancy or manage it in-house - the objective is to mitigate risk and liability caused by non-compliance.

7 Reasons to implement a Contract Lifecycle Management program:

1- Leaving dollars on the table because you have not enforced the negotiated terms with your software vendor

2- Reducing costs and decreasing contract administration

3- Creating a proactive approach to understand your contractual assets to avoid litigation for non-compliance

4- Delivering greater value to your customers (both internal and external)

5- Saving expenditure dollars (short-term and long-term)

6- Significantly decrease wasted time searching for contracts, schedules and file notes

7- Changing the role of contract administrator to contract manager.

On June 1, 2009 Oracle will be licensing all purchases of Hyperion software under the standard Oracle licensing model.

Under Hyperion’s old licensing model, multiple and complex pricing levels existed with separate pricing for items such as server fees, testing & development and various pricing for multiple user roles.

Under the new model, Hyperion’s pricing will follow Oracle’s simpler licensing model. However, user licenses on Hyperion software will increase in price on June 1.

If your organization currently has -and will continue to need- Hyperion user licenses or you will be adding Hyperion to your enterprise, you may be able to gain significant savings and increased ROI if you purchase licenses before May 31.

The latest Oracle processor core scaling factor table now rates an IBM Power6 processor at a scaling factor of 1.0 per core, which means no more 25 per cent discount on Power6 processor cores when it comes to Oracle products.

The Power6 processor, launched initially in the summer of 2007, is a dual-core chip and design, just like its predecessors the Power5 and the Power5+ kicker. But the Power6 chip is said to have roughly twice the performance vis-à-vis the Power5 chips in online transaction processing workloads.

The Oracle price hike on Power6 chips might appear to some as unfair given that the quad-core Sparc64 VII processors used in Sun machines have the same 0.75 scaling factor. Ditto for quad-core x64 chips from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices; and dual-core Itanium 9100 series chips from Intel, which currently have a 0.50 scaling factor. (That is effectively the same thing as saying a Power6 core is worth two x64 or Itanium cores.)

In Oracle’s defense, IBM’s analog to their processor scaling factor methodology, which it calls value unit pricing and introduced in the summer of 2006, is a sort of comparable scaling metric for processor-based pricing. In fact IBM charges more for Power6 processors for IBM’s own DB2 and other systems software than it does for Power5 systems. Power6 and System z10 mainframes have a rating of 120 per core, compared to 100 for Power5 cores and 80 for Power6 chips used in the JS12 and JS22 blade servers sold by IBM.