LMT Episode 03 - 5 Fatal Licence Mistakes

02/04/15 • 17 min

So news last month of Thomas Kurian, Larry Ellison and Flexcube in the cloud. The featured article this episode is one of our most popular posts, “5 Fatal Mistakes of Oracle licensing.” For all you kind people who have downloaded, please provide feedback and questions. We would love to address any questions on the show. I am currently reaching out to a bunch of very interesting people to have on the show. If you would like to be on the show please get in touch. Thomas Kurian Promoted to President Almost four months since Larry Ellison handed his CEO title to both Safra Catz and Mark Hurd, he has now promoted Thomas Kurian to President. The forty-eight year old was EVP for product development having started his Oracle career leading the Middleware strategy. He helped take Oracle to a leader in the Middleware with the suite of Middleware tools. Larry helps the critters Larry is clearly a busy man and is putting some of his substantial wealth to helping establish a Wildlife breeding and animal rehab centre in the Santa Cruz mountains. Read more at NBC The Bay Area News Oracle Cloud runs a new UK Bank Hampden & Co. will be running Oracle’s core banking solution Flexcube on Oracle cloud. Oracle will run the application as a managed service on Oracle Sparc T5 out of the UK Oracle data center in Linlithgow, just outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Hampden Group run a diversified set of services in the insurance and finance sectors. They announced last year that they would be taking a significant stake in a new bank for private clients called Hampden & Co plc. oracle licensing rules – 5 Fatal Mistakes “Five Fatal Oracle License Mistakes”, alright the title is a bit dramatic, but the following 5 mistakes crop up on such a regular basis that we at Madora believe they are worth reiterating. For those experienced with Oracle, they will know the following as classic gotchas and will keep an eye out. IT professionals and Procurement Officers new to the ways of Oracle may get caught out – so be warned. Let’s walk through some of the five common areas that often have disastrous consequences. The Five Fatal Mistakes are: 1. Virtualising without fully understanding the implications. The issue we see time after time is misunderstanding Oracle licensing on VMware. So why is this? It’s to do with server partitioning. Server partitioning can be very confusing; it is designed to limit the amount of processor resource available to a program; it is nothing to do with the Oracle Database Partitioning extra cost option – that is a means of partitioning data tables. Oracle simplifies server partitioning into two groups; the methods that it refuses to recognise as valid, known as “Soft Partitioning”; and those it accepts really do subdivide servers, known as “Hard Partitioning”. Probably the most popular server partitioning method is VMware, a very flexible form of partitioning and a great means of managing a datacentre. Guess what? It is soft partitioning for Oracle; this means that it is incredibly easy to fall foul of Oracle’s licensing rules. How your VCenter is set up, the clusters, the VMs, the storage architecture all have an impact on licensing. VMware publish guidelines on how to license Oracle but Oracle don’t support their view; great fun when it is your turn for Oracle’s regular license audit! Oracle’s approach to VMware has changed even further since the release of VMware Version 5.1 with its more advanced DRS/VMotion capabilities and its shared storage functionality. Seek independent help to review your architecture and any planned changes; don’t assume anything!! 2. Disaster Recovery scenarios not licensed correctly This can be a complex area with technologies changing all the time. We highly recommend you speak to Madora Consulting if you have any doubts as to whether you are correctly licensed for DR architectures. In general we advise that you assume you need to be licensed fully and then check to see if your scenario falls under failover and whether the 10 day rule applies. In terms of licensing be aware that you cannot mix metrics. In other words if processors are used for the primary site then the backup site also needs to be licensed by processor. A common mistake is believing that Named User Plus licenses can be used for the backup site – in the hope of saving money. You are better off ring fencing the DR servers contractually and negotiating a reduced cost for this license pool. Also make sure that the options and management packs are licensed, as these are often forgotten. In short, scenarios where the Primary and Secondary nodes share a SAN, with the secondary node acting as a failover, only the Primary needs to be licensed. This is valid as long as the failover to the secondary lasts less than 10 days per year, which includes any testing. Any standby or mirroring environments must be fully licensed. See the Oracle paper on DR pricing http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/data-recovery-licensing-070...

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LMT Episode 02 - Is Oracle Waking Up to Cloud?

Thank you for downloading. Please find us online at Madora.co.uk. Would love to hear from you. Drop me a line via email [email protected] Is Oracle starting to wake up to the demand of its users for more cloud capabilities and flexible licence models? With recent announcements in Oracle OpenWorld 2014, is Oracle starting to wake up to the demand of its users for more cloud capabilities and flexible licence models? Oracle’s core business has, like many of the larger enterprise software companies been focused on selling software designed to run on premise and charging a flat fee for the licenses and typically an annual support and maintenance fee. Over the last fifteen years we have seen a number of application providers providing access to their application via subscription models that do not require the purchase of any infrastructure – database, application servers, operating systems, networking or and hardware servers. Although Larry Ellison has in the past been quick to poo poo cloud computing he has clearly woken up to the industry shift. “We have a new, much-upgraded cloud platform,” Ellison said to his key note speech on the 28th September. “We are just getting started. We launched our real platform this month.” Previously the only options for customers to run Oracle in the cloud on a true subscription basis was via Amazon or Azure. Oracle will “have the same pricing as Amazon or any other infrastructure provider,” Chairman Larry Ellison said at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco. Oracle has seemed to be behind in many ways with regards to providing utility or SaaS type pricing. Sure Oracle would argue that Fusion Apps have been available for a while and the cloud application portfolio is increasing all the time. However most customers still run ‘on the premise applications’ which are fundamentally different than the Fusion Apps which were written from scratch for the cloud. It is these traditional ERP/CRM/SCM legacy applications that present a number of problems for customers: Licensing metrics are often not clear. It does not allow for the growth or decline of the business. It does not allow for spikes or seasonal peaks. It does not lend itself for innovation, testing of new concepts. It does not allow a trial to review business benefits or ROI. So what about customers that have written their own apps running on Oracle or use vendor apps based on Oracle? Many want to pay for Oracle technology licences as a subscriptions whether on premise on their own kit or on the cloud.Clearly Oracle is moving this way with enhancements to its PaaS services. See https://cloud.oracle.com/database The fully ‘Oracle managed’ Oracle database is yet to make an appearance but pricing is available for a number of options. For example the client managed option for High Performance Enterprise Edition is $4,000 / Month per OCPU. This sounds high but it does include a large number of management, testing and security database options. The pricing is also available by the hour so it is absolutely possible to use this for testing, development or backup. It’s per OCPU – not sure what that really means. When I get a better idea I will let you know. Where I see the real opportunity is for the duel running of new systems. Previously the only real option for customers to run new systems in parallel for a period before switch over was to buy 1 year term licenses in order to remain compliant. Cloud Alternatives The current alternatives to Oracle’s cloud services are Amazon http://aws.amazon.com/oracle/ or Microsoft’s Azure. Amazon Web Services and Oracle Amazon RDS for Oracle allows you to bring your own licences or use Oracle included licences. Costs start from 0.04 USD per hour for the on-demand licence included option which means that running an oracle application really is more affordable than ever. Bring you own licence starts at 0.025 USD. There does appear to be one downside of the licence included option and that is the database is Standard Edition 1. This could mean that applications that use Enterprise option will not be able to take advantage of this. While this may not provide the licence subscription desirable for most enterprise applications, for developers this could be a more effective way to run proof of concepts. What about cannibalisation of revenues? One of the main criticisms of Oracle not being so quick to adopt subscription based licence models for Database and Middleware was the concerns about cannibalisation of its existing revenue streams. Last month in the Oracle earnings call Oracle reported fiscal first-quarter profit and sales that were below analysts’ projections. Oracle also forecast Q2 revenues and profits below estimates. Oracle is investing in its cloud division and there is a big drive within Oracle to push managed cloud services with big incentives for its sales teams. On the same call Safra Catz, Oracle co-CEO said,”As the movement to the cloud grows, we expect this trans...

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LMT Episode 04 - 10 Oracle Negotiation Myths

News Roundup and one of our most popular articles "10 Oracle Negotiation Myths" Oracle CEO issues warning to competitors Mark Hurd, Oracle’s CEO was very bullish about the future of Oracle in an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street”, given on Thursday the 29th January. CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street“ The interview on CNBC.com can be found on this link http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000350362 In the interview Mark Hurd talks about his Cloud strategy, providing best of breed SaaS solutions for Marketing Automation, Human Capital Management in their own right as well as suites of applications. Larry Ellison CTO announces the new generation of Engineered Systems – Exadata X5 On January 21st Oracle’s CTO Larry Ellison presented Oracle’s strategy for reducing customer costs and increasing value with a new generation of engineered systems, including Oracle’s new Virtual Compute Appliance X5, Oracle FS1 Series Flash Storage System, and sixth-generation Oracle Exadata Database Machine X5. Software licensing trends present significant risks for unprepared businesses Oklahoman Published: February 1, 2015 I came across this very interesting article in the Oklahoman. Drew T. Palmer, an Oklahoma attorney with Crowe & Dunlevy’s Intellectual Property group, explains some pitfalls for businesses in licensing. Oracle and Samsung joining forces for mobile cloud collaboration? The Korean Times reported a meeting between Oracles’ CEO Mark Hurd and Samsung’s mobile chief Shin Jong-Kyun. 10 Oracle Negotiation Myths – Part 1 Myth – “A widely held but false belief or idea.” In the Oracle eco-system a number of myths and misconceptions have grown up around purchasing from Oracle. These are myths I’ve heard from talking to customers regularly. Perhaps you also know a few you can share. Here are our top 10 Myths: My company is too small to get a good discount. Oracle say their products lines are not connected and won’t give me discount across all products. Oracle say I need to buy a ULA to solve a non compliance. I am told I can’t have products on a price hold that I have not bought. I want to do an annual true up like Microsoft but told I can’t. I want to buy licences using a non standard metric. I am told if I don’t buy this quarter the discount agreed will go. If I wait to the end of the quarter I will get a better deal. If I buy through a partner I will pay more. I can’t decrease my support and maintenance below 22%.