According to recent Gartner and other
industry sources Oracle Audits are on the rise, with around 19% of respondents
indicating this type of activity in 2010-2011. For SME and Large Corporate
Enterprises; Oracle Licensing and support costs are often the same in terms of
cost as Microsoft. As Oracle is designed to meet the stringent demands of
mission critical systems for ERP, Finance and HR, companies have often invested
large sums of their software budgets to support this over the years. Internally
business have paid for this out-side of the standard IT infrastructure budgets,
aligning these costs directly to Finance and ERP functions in the business.
Detail:
Other surveys indicate that 70% of
Oracle customers still use older Oracle license metrics, such as Concurrent
Device, Names User Single Server, Universal Power Unit. If customers conduct license migrations of these older licenses for Oracle s Named
User Plus and Processor metrics they could bolster their license balances to
ward off any potential licensing shortfalls. However a warning should be made
that some of these metrics are more beneficial in terms of usage rights. For
example a Concurrent Device license allow for any number of users to connect
the database licensed up to a maximum number of concurrent connections,
extremely useful in industrial manufacturing systems, however this license
metric is becoming increasing defunct as customer are using chargeable features
in newer version of the database that are not supported by that license metric. A customer recently divulged that they saved
over 50,000 per year in Oracle Support
revenues by consolidation of their Oracle Development tool licensing to newer
products and license metrics.
Customer with over 1M investment in Oracle in reality this could be just 3 Servers with four processor quad cores
running Oracle Database Enterprise Edition, yes just three servers. However if
the customer had 400 Oracle Enterprise Edition Named User Multi-server licenses,
they could convert these to 8 Oracle Enterprise Edition Processor Licenses,
this gives the customer an unlimited amount of users who can access the
Database. It is also worth noting that if the customer is using any newer
version let say 11g, he will not be able to buy any of the new Oracle Options
or OEM Packs associated with his existing
licenses for Named User Multi-server. There will probably in all effect
be some support costs in changing license model, however the benefits in term
of compliance should out-weigh this
quite easily.
As many Oracle Partners and
Oracle are aware this is not a new issue, but it still shocks us to see how
many customers have older license metrics in their contracts. Our advice is
that customers who want to find ways of driving down costs in their licenses
need to understand two key things, what
value do our contracts give us and what are we really using . Only then can the
businesses commercial teams make effective decisions to reduce their costs either through License Migrations, Database
Consolidations and other license optimization activities.
