Oracle’s licensing has been described as ‘complex and treacherous’. And sadly its focus has shifted to extracting additional value from its existing users – as opposed to new business where competition is fierce and open source is a ready alternative.

Oracle’s tactics include:

• Initiating seemingly anodyne licence reviews encouraging you to offer up the evidence that Oracle needs to issue a demand for new licence fees and arrears of support and maintenance;
• Offering discounted bundled offers but then being reluctant to reduce part only of a bundled offering at a later date;
• Delivering programs which include applications which were not ordered and are inadvertently triggered eg diagnostics and tuning;
• Refusing to accept soft-partitioning and requiring all cores to be licensed;
• Requiring all servers on which any programs are installed – even if not running – to be licensed for all cores / processors;
• Demanding penalties without offering the true discount levels which would otherwise be expected in the market;
• Refusing to accept shelving and then reinstatement;
• Presenting licence demands for true-up on very short notice to comply with salesman’s quarterly targets as opposed to customer needs;
• Relying on white papers and new guidance to shift meaning of earlier licence terms.

Cerno is experienced in Oracle licence negotiations and, utilising our commercial + contractual + technical analysis, we seek to challenge assertions by Oracle or LMS in order to reduce your software costs.