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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In our previous posts, we have reviewed the need for: Price Holds Maintenance Freeze And in this post, we will discuss the need for caps on the Annual increases for Maintenance and Support Services. Support Caps What is a Support Cap? A support cap seeks to place limits on the compounded effect of annual increases to the costs of the annual maintenance and support services fees beyond the Maintenance Freeze term. Why is it Important? If there is no language to govern the amount of increase after the Maintenance Freeze (#11 in our list) term, the costs of annual maintenance and support services can skyrocket and quickly get out of control. ...
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William Edwards Deming (1900-1993) is widely acknowledged as the leading thinker in the field of quality. He was a statistician and business consultant who is well known for his “14 Points for Management”. He used to say that ‘management is prediction,’ by which he meant that every decision is also a prediction about the future. The rate of change continues to increase, and as it does the business environment becomes ever more complex. Amidst this complex and uncertain environment, business still has to accomplish something – by getting work done. And getting work done is increasingly outsourced to 3rd parties. In 2017, the global ...
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NET(net) advises all clients to strive to “lock down” every escalating cost of Oracle’s annual maintenance and support services by negotiating a maintenance freeze for as long as possible. What is a maintenance freeze? It’s a provision in the contract to ensure that Oracle doesn’t increase the annual maintenance service and support costs year over year; and on a compounding basis. Why is it needed? Across our experiences, Oracle often charges a 9% annual increase, which compounds year-over-year, and fundamentally Diminishes the Inclusive Value of the annual maintenance & support services Equation: the DIVE phenomenon). A cost increase of ...
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The votes are counted, and Oracle yet again wins for being perhaps the most tyrannical of all technology suppliers. The standard Oracle Terms and Conditions are legendary for being one-sided. What’s worse, Oracle has gained an equally reviled reputation for leveraging those terms and conditions to their full and unilateral benefit at the great expense of their customers. If you are renewing your annual maintenance with Oracle, buying new Oracle software, engaged in or concerned about an Oracle audit, considering Cloud solutions or having them forced upon you, or just thinking about how to mitigate cost and risk and improve the realization of ...
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Kin Hubbard, a humorist and journalist who lived 100 years ago once said “the safest way to double your money is to fold it over once and put it in your pocket”. Clearly views are different today. The value of mergers and acquisitions in the U.S. financial-services sector alone more than doubled to a whopping $196.5 billion in 2018 from $82.3 billion in 2017. According to a report by White & Case, Financial Institutions M&A Sector 2019 Trends, there are possibilities of mega deals in Europe and that Wall Street behemoths may start flexing their expansion muscles. And when that materializes, a Stock Purchase Agreement (SPA) is the ...
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Most clients today use a complicated procedure for processing supplier payments to ensure the process is not only accurate and complete, but also: comports with the terms of the commercial agreement performs in compliance with the conditions of the contractual agreement is done with authenticated trading partners isn’t fraudulent or illicit in any way is fully auditable An Example of This Authentication Process: A Purchase Requisition is made, signifying the internal demand for the seller’s products and services. The terms of a Commercial Arrangement are agreed to, including product, service, and pricing information. A Contractual Agreement ...
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