Steven Zolman

Apr. 21,2011

“Wait!" you say.  “How did you know my Oracle renewal was coming up?”

At NET(net), we’d like to respond that it’s magic – a result of doing thousands of deals and the development of a sixth sense about these things.  We’d like to point to our Federated Market Intelligence as an example of the type of value we bring to clients on a daily basis.  But the truth is that virtually ALL Oracle deals renew in May, not just yours.

“So?  Lots of deals renew in the spring.  What’s so special about May?”

Actually, while some suppliers do use the actual anniversary date of your original agreement(s) upon which to base their renewals, Oracle, if given the chance, expends extraordinary effort to co-term all agreements in May for a very selfish reason.  It’s the end of their fiscal year.  By setting up all of their renewals this way, they can claim this years’ renewals on last years’ financials.

The specifics of why this is beneficial to Oracle notwithstanding, the point is that it’s one of but hundreds of ways in which Oracle does things for their benefit, not yours.

On the flip-side, an announcement from Amazon regarding their web services offering is hitting the news recently: Oracle licenses can now be used on Amazon’s Web Services.  In fact, you can even license access to an Oracle database by the hour if you can’t BYOL (Bring Your Own License).  The specifics of the service notwithstanding, this represents a major shift in how certain businesses will be able to use Oracle products in a more cost effective and efficient manner.

This is not to say that traditional licensing will be going away anytime soon (as promoted by our friends over at Forrester).  The death of the perpetual license has been prematurely pronounced many times in recent years.  But the flexibility to use Oracle databases in this way offers those organizations that need temporary and rapidly-available database processing power the ability to get it without binding themselves to long-term maintenance and support agreements.

Amazon is also promoting that many (if not all) of the eBusiness Suite applications will be coming in the near future, as well.  Assuming this experiment is successful, it stands to reason that competitors with existing large datacenters (Apple, Akamai, etc) may find themselves offering competing services.  The net effect, however, is that Amazon’s efforts are, in effect, providing Oracle the ability to move their traditional products “to the cloud” without investing in the infrastructure themselves.

But until you’ve moved in this direction, you still only have a little more than a month to look out for yourself this year as it pertains to Oracle.  And since most of you are reporting this year’s spend on this year’s financials, wouldn’t you like to save up to 50% off your existing Oracle spend?

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