Why is it important? It’s important because many of our clients have multiple operating environments in different business units, sometimes in different geographies or even countries, and sometimes these are unrelated businesses that just so happen to be owned by the same company. In many cases, there is no relation between the needs of the operating environments, and therefore any policy to enforce equal treatment is unjustly onerous and costs our clients dearly. The business reason Oracle cites is to prevent customers from having many similar licenses, but only supporting a few of them, which makes it difficult for Oracle to determine if ...
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Digital transformation is an actively discussed topic these days, but this was also true in the late 1990s and again in the mid-2000s. In fact, computerizing processes started back in the late 17th century when Leibniz developed a base 2 numerical system only using 0 and 1. With the introduction of the World Wide Web 300 years later, the scope, scale, and speed of technology have fundamentally impacted the effects of digitalization. First websites connected companies and their customers. Companies including Dell were quickly disrupting traditional PC manufacturing companies selling direct to consumers and gaining valuable insights into ...
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Why is it important? Oracle’s ability to re-price can effectively eliminate any product pricing discounts off list, should you cancel a partial license set. Even with a price hold, Oracle leverages its support policies drawn into the contract by External Reference (#6 on our List) to re-price your annual maintenance and service support costs to effectively eliminate your discounts and make your costs as high as list price if you terminate partial orders. If you were to buy 100 licenses at a 50% discount, and you were paying $100,000 of annual maintenance service and support charges, you would think that if you terminated 50 of those licenses ...
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The more I work with Cisco lately, the more I’m reminded of the television commercial made famous by the Wendy’s hamburger chain in the United States, wherein an elderly woman and her friends open their giant hamburger bun only to find a tiny piece of meat inside and ask, “Where’s the beef!?” When I review Cisco EA agreements, our clients and I are asking the same question, but in this case the EA is the giant bun and the beef is the value. What’s getting presented to us on this nice Cisco plate appears to be a lot of hamburger (i.e. the “best deal!”), but often when we lift the bun, the value (beef) is elusive and hard to find. The “Best ...
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This latest installment is probably one of our shortest, but no less important! In the standard Oracle agreement, Oracle refers to externally controlled websites for things such as the definition of support, and as such, they have the unilateral ability and control to fundamentally change the terms and conditions of your agreement without you even knowing about it until it is too late. Even if there is notification, over time these communications get lost, people leave who were points of contact, and or it may never have gotten sent to start with. We have many suggestions for Oracle's customers in this area around notifications, potential ...
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What is the Thrive Ultimatum? 2019 and into 2020 will present the 'C-Suite' with a Digital Transformation ultimatum. Digital initiatives can no longer be ‘shelved’ or viewed as a future innovation that are delayed by a myriad of excuses. Organizations operating this way are often in survival mode, feeling encumbered by forces outside their control. But survival is no longer enough as consumers, businesses, and shareholders demand that organizations move past survival mode, to thrive mode and cross the chasm of digital change and disruption now. Organizations that recognize this imperative and act on it are succeeding in the digital age. ...
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What is the Bundling of Support? The bundling of support is Oracle’s long-standing policy to sell product upgrades and technical support together as a single offering, and not allow customers to buy them separately. Why is it important? It’s important because in mature deployments, many customers no longer need product upgradability, but they still want access to technical support for the appearance of risk mitigation. In those instances, they are forced to pay for one to get the other. Oracle combines technical break/fix product support with product upgradability (the rights to upgrade the product with no additional software license cost) ...
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Many of you may be waiting and watching to see how the trade issues between China and the United States are resolved, and specifically its impact on Huawei. With current and future Telecom & Network infrastructure projects under consideration, what are the critical things to know when considering Huawei? Despite all the political turmoil for Huawei, most of it originating out of the United States, the company has quietly become one of the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturers in the world. Huawei expects revenue of about $100 billion annually for the next two years, compared with $105 billion in 2018 including a $30B ...
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What is a license exchange? A license exchange is a private market setup between you and Oracle, whereby you can ‘trade-in’ the list license value of software you no longer want or need for a list license value credit on new titles you do want. Why is it important? It’s important because absent this protection, it’s exceedingly difficult to get any value from software that you no longer want or need, and in many cases, it’s because the software didn’t work the way you thought it was going to work, or it didn’t provide the level of value you needed to justify its use. The other critical flaw in the Oracle approach to licensing management, is ...
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What are reduced minimums? When Oracle licenses certain software by various metrics (other than their preferred metric of Processor), Oracle is responding to customer demand for an improved metric designed to provide some economic relief, generally for non-production use. Most commonly, Oracle agrees to allow its customers to license certain environments (like test or development environments) by named user, instead of by processor. In so doing, however, Oracle generally requires user minimums (a minimum number of users that have to be licensed in order to receive that benefit), so as not to give too big of a financial concession to the end ...
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