Unlike consumers who have been panic-buying bathroom paper products in bulk over the last few weeks, IT executives have prepared for security threats and natural disasters for many years and have deployed highly resilient solutions with varying degrees of business continuity. Clients have spent millions for things like network redundancy, contact center contingency planning, remote workforce support, and business application and underlying compute and storage infrastructure availability. The list could go on. In fact, there is a whole industry set up to help IT leaders face this business continuity challenge. What many of those plans fell ...
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Clients are well advised to include specific language governing Oracle audits. Most important is the ability to purchase any compliance licenses as a result of an audit action at the contractual price hold discounts (#12 on our Oracle's Most Egregious list), and in the event that the price hold expires, at a mutually agreeable discount at the prevailing discounts available in the market for similar deals not to be unreasonably withheld. The current contract language in the standard Oracle agreement requires clients to purchase compliance licenses at list price. In the case of a 75% price hold discount, this would mean you are acquiring the ...
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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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‘The Most Wonderful Time of the Year’ is a popular holiday song and was written by Edward Pola and George Wyle in 1963. It was popularized in North America by singer Andy Williams that same year on his television show by the same name. However, we didn’t have to do much research to learn that the inspiration for that song had nothing to do with the 4th quarter for most business leaders and their respective companies. Anecdotally, we believe most business leaders might say it’s the most *stressful* time of the year, especially for publicly traded companies – most of whom have their fiscal year end aligned with the calendar year end of ...
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Its been a long time since HCM solutions were primarily used for ‘counting noses’. Companies large and small understand the strategic value in their workforce and are aggressively using HCM solutions to support their investment, and HCM providers know it. Between emerging technology, disruptive companies, mergers and acquisitions, changing licensing models, cloud migrations, and much more, to say today’s HCM software market is under rapid change would be a massive understatement. Unfortunately, none of us really have the luxury of ignoring these changes lest we be left in the wake of overpaying for a non-compliant, underperforming, and ...
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Over the past 16 years, we’ve seen almost every way possible for an organization to lose value in their technology supplier arrangements, agreements, and relationships. Sometimes these situations arise from external forces that leave little in the way of options like mergers, acquisitions, or litigation. Many times, however, we find that organizations could have improved if only they had a few key insights. If a company is willing to take the necessary steps to acknowledge where they have shortcomings in information, expertise, and experience, they could avoid many of these pitfalls. It’s difficult to know what you don’t know, and as a ...
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