Certification of an Oracle ULA Agreement (or: Need to defuse a bomb?)
One of the most read articles on this site is about Oracle ULA contract risks. When talking to clients it turns out that many don’t see the entire picture. I’ll try to be a bit more explicit, and you’re not going to like it. Read more
Oracle Platinum Partner warning clients against Oracle audit practices
A large Oracle Platinum Partner from the Netherlands recently had enough from Oracle auditing their clients. They sent a mailing, warning clients against the audit practices (quotes are freely translated from Dutch):
“Our experience is that in many review reports, big mistakes and incorrect assumptions are being made. As a result, the reviews in general have a negative Read more
License Consulting speaking about licensing Oracle on IBM PSeries
With evolving technologies, licensing becomes more and more complex. And companies design their IT around technology and not around licensing. There’s nothing wrong with that: However, more often than not the designs result in an unexpectedly high license requirement. Virtualizing Oracle databases is a very known aspect in this regard. Read more
The OpenWorld licensing Quiz – answers (and winner?)
With a tool such as iQuate’s iQSonar in the market, Oracle SAM has become more accessible, transparent, simple and efficient in terms of fact finding. And that is great news. But as always, data needs interpretation. To see how much clients really know about interpreting such, we prepared a licensing quiz. Over 100 licensing cracks and clients were challenged at Open World to answer the 8 questions of the iQuate quiz at Oracle Open World correctly. Many started off confident, but almost nobody handed the results in confident! In the end of the day, NOBODY had all the questions correct Read more
The OpenWorld Quiz – Win an iPod Touch
For our friends at iQuate a questionnaire was prepared to be handed out at their stand at Oracle Open World. People who would give answer to the 8 Oracle licensing questions, were be able to win the newest iPod Touch: Sponsored by License Consulting.
In this post you see the Questions that we came up with. Read more
Oracle vs License Consulting: Round two
It’s been a while since my last post on the legal case that Oracle initiated against License Consulting. As said, during the preliminary injunction the court ruled that Oracle’s mission resembled a fishing expedition and their request to obtain the data would not be honored without a full fledged trial. Under Dutch law, Oracle must complete the full legal procedure until the very end, so the show must go on.
But time has passed, and Oracle no longer has a commercial interest in legally pursuing this case. As such, Oracle tried to settle. The settlement agreement drafted by Oracle said that License Consulting:
a) May not talk about the details of the settlement, Read more
Saving a million on Oracle licenses within 2 days
Sometimes all pieces fit together.
A customer hired License Consulting to take a look at their Oracle environment. The investigation concluded that the company was incompliant with Named User licenses, and even after a migration, a substantial amount of processor licenses should be bought. To be precise: Oracle licenses valued at € 1,000,925.44. Read more
Oracle “On the way home” sessions with Valid
This July the ‘Extended Support’ on Oracle 9 will be discontinued. As database-upgrades often raise a lot of questions and concerns, License Consulting and Valid will host a series of ‘on-the-way-home’ sessions about this subject. End users can attend – for free – and will get insight in the effect of support agreements and fees, as well as the impact of compliance: Many companies are incompliant without knowing it, and an upgrade is a great time to quantify and solve this problem. We will present our most recent case where a potential license cost with many (!!) figures was due, but with mutual efforts this need for Oracle licenses was reduced to almost zero. Read more
Court decision – Oracle vs License Consulting 0:1
Indeed it is an incredible title for an article, and I never thought anything like it would be written by me.
Sometime last year, my house was raided by Oracle. 2 policemen and 3 bailiffs showed up, with a court order that allowed them to secure data that I obtained during a licensing project at one of my clients. Oracle was then tempting me to handover that confidential information voluntarily, not realizing I’d rather go bankrupt than do such a hideous thing Read more
Oracle ULA contract agreement risk factors
Oracle really wants to sell ULA license agreements to everyone. ULA stands for an ‘Unlimited License Agreement’. That sounds nice, but what limitations does that unlimited license have? And, what risk factors are involved? Let’s go through the details of what exactly an ULA will do.
First let’s look at the limitations. Unlike the name, it’s limited to at least the following points:
a) The entity/entities that are listed on the agreement
b) A specific (named) list of Oracle products
c) A specific region?
d) A limited timeframe (in general, 2 to 5 years)
e) Capped to a maximum amount of Processors. That’s a ‘Capped ULA’. Very boring indeed. Read more
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