As 2019 drew to a close, many of you may have missed a significant development that came out of the U.S. District Court of Northern California. On December 17th, the lawsuit brought by the Sunrise Firefighter’s Pension Fund against Oracle Corporation for misleading investors on their cloud business – was dismissed. They have until February 2020 to make some changes and refile the case, but what the real take-away from this case is that we can expect ‘business as usual’ from Oracle on the audit front.
To get a real sense of just how egregious and critical the audit practice was (and is) to Oracle’s revenue machine, you need only read some of the actual witness testimony. We encourage anyone to read the transcripts of the nine relevant witnesses that testified where ‘compliance-based deals’ were not only standard operating procedure but were reported to the highest levels on a regular basis.
Truncated quotes from the case read like a scene from Law and Order:
Would a judgement against Oracle have slowed this freight train of audits down? Probably not in the short term given the challenge of taking on a company whose net profit in 2019 was over $11B USD. What it does tell us, however, is that with a dismissal there are zero reasons for Oracle to cease using its LMS/SIA divisions to come down hard on clients with audits and all manner of threatening letters.
If this happens to you, contact us and we can help you sort through the nightmare and ensure that not only is the audit issue mitigated, but that your company is right sized and paying fair market pricing for licenses (cloud or on-premise). There is a myriad of mine fields to watch out for – and we’ve seen them all. Oracle has executed literally thousands of software audits over the years, and they are way ahead of you!
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