If you are like me, you have been receiving an avalanche of email notifications from every company you’ve ever done business with letting you know how they are responding to the Covid-19 crisis. Did I really need to know how my auto mechanic is responding to the epidemic? Probably not at the top of my list. However, if you can get through the noise, there have been some legitimate offers to help companies support their teams and customers through the crisis. Most of these offers are in the form of free services and software for an extended period of time (30-60-90 days and more). Below, we’ve compiled a list of twenty-three companies and ...
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Unprecedented times for business leaders now as the gears of industry and commerce are basically at a standstill. Most companies have a complete freeze on spending and are contingency planning for things to get worse before they get better. While sometimes there is ‘opportunity in chaos’ so too is the potential to make costly mistakes in our haste to facilitate immediate needs. Today, we’ll be looking at Microsoft and some issues to consider as the economy heads for a downturn. Remote Work: Although remote/home office work is a well-established trend in many industries, others are still grappling with management and cost challenges (not to ...
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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 ...
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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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In Part I we discussed consideration of a multicloud strategy. Pricing and product transparency were the themes for part II. In part III we address the last in this series: Application Portability. To see all three in our Multicloud eBook, please visit here. The enterprise’s application processing workloads must be compatible to portability between Cloud providers, including technology stacks that are common across all Cloud provider platforms, such as the use of application microservices and open stack services such as containers and Kubernetes. It is also important to consider how you'll integrate data and applications residing in ...
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What is Auto-Install? Auto-Install is an executable file in the Oracle software kit that activates when a customer installs certain software and automatically loads various options that may or may not be included in the purchase price of the acquired software. Why is it Important? It’s important because generally the people who install the Oracle software are not contextually aware of all the intricacies of software licensing, nor perhaps are they even aware of the particulars of the commercial arrangement between your company and Oracle. They are, however, generally fans of the Oracle technology, and want all the added features, so when ...
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If you missed Part I - start here. Is a Cloud Broker right for you? A Cloud Broker by definition is an entity that manages the use, performance and delivery of cloud services, and negotiates relationships between cloud providers and cloud consumers. As cloud computing evolves, the integration of cloud services may be too complex for Cloud consumers to manage alone. A Cloud Broker can also be in a unique position to collect, analyze and conduct opportunity assessments on pricing that will be key to a multicloud or Cloud Arbitrage strategy. Generally, cloud arbitrage is the practice of taking advantage of a price difference between two or more ...
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Business Transaction Protection is language in the agreement that provides some much needed flexibility in the event of a business transaction that significantly alters the value of the Oracle software deployment Why is it Important? These business transactions are often the source of many audit demands, and the standard Oracle language is vague and limited on what rights a customer has with regard to these types of transactions. We suggest clients include language in the agreement that gives added protections and flexibility for business transactions like mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, carve-outs, etc. Transition Service Agreements ...
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Many enterprises adopt a multicloud strategy out of a desire to avoid Cloud supplier lock-in or to take advantage of innovative solutions with a certain Cloud provider. There are many rationales for using multiple clouds, as they each have different strengths and weaknesses for performance and functionality, different pricing schemes, and some workloads simply run better on one cloud platform versus another. Although neither provide a financial breakdown of their cloud business, AWS continues to dominate the cloud infrastructure market, but its lead is starting to wane as Microsoft Azure and Google Compute Engine make significant inroads. ...
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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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