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 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 ...
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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, ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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According to MarketWatch, the global HCM market size in 2018 was $12.6B USD and is poised to grow to $22.6B by 2025! That is an impressive growth number and companies will be going all out to claim their share of it. While these ‘Big 5’ take up a massive chunk of the HCM market, the biggest piece of the pie is still quantified as ‘other’, meaning there are a myriad of options for enterprises to choose from. Before you can even consider the niche players and startups on the cutting edge of HCM technology, you first have to know what the big players can do. They will claim they can do everything under the sun, but in some cases that’s only ...
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Software audits have become an unfortunate but necessary revenue stream for most suppliers today. And who can really blame them? It usually works! Just as governments have now come to rely on revenue from things like speeding and parking tickets, so to have software companies come to rely on software audits to move the needle on revenue or generate fear, using pressure and leverage to create opportunities for new licensing revenue. The reasons are well known, and really haven’t changed significantly in the last few years: Competition from disruptive suppliers Migration away from perpetual licensing to subscription-based cloud solutions ...
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I’m sure your organization is used to fifty calls per week from Oracle. You likely have thirty sales reps calling everyone from custodial services to the Chief Executive Officer to gain more information from you: What’s your IT roadmap? Do you know we have a 'cloud' for everything? What is your cloud migration strategy? What is your budget? Can we have more of it? From the cold callers to the executives, Oracle sales are trained in tactics to acquire as much information about your organization as possible. Their endgame is simple: force you into a sale (probably cloud) or catch you out of compliance. And of course, your being out of ...
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