LMT Episode 04 - 10 Oracle Negotiation Myths

02/11/15 • 16 min

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%.

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LMT Episode 03 - 5 Fatal Licence Mistakes

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 05 - Interview with Easytrust

Today we have our first ‘Featured’ interview with our guest Maxime Pawlak, Managing Director of Easytrust. We have lined up a number of very interesting people over the coming months to share their expertise and knowledge in the areas of Software Asset Management, Oracle Licensing and influential IT trends in general. Maxime will also feature in our next podcast ‘Licence Management Today – Episode 05′. The full transcript of the interview between Kay and Maxime is on our blog. It was a pleasure to talk to Maxime, who is extremely knowledgeable about the Oracle Compliance marketplace and provides a lot of experiences and know how. Some Highlights below: Maxime: We’re part of the software asset management market, we are specific on that market because we only address Oracle. Usually people, they separate the software management market in the inventory tools and the software management tools and some tools which can do both of them. We can do both of them, we do inventory and we do software asset management but we just do it for Oracle and we can do it right. We can bring up value audits around Oracle licenses problems and solutions. In terms of industry customers we address, we address every single industry who are Oracle customers so it concerns every industry. Kay: Okay, as a non-technical person could you explain to me what the differences between the inventory tools and the software asset management? Maxime: Of course, yes. The inventory tools, it’s all about discovering which are the software installed on the laptops or the servers of customers. It’s about with agents or agent-less technologies connecting to that servers or to that laptops and grab some information about the presence of the software installed or not. This is the inventory part of the market and there are some tools in the market which just do inventory. They are especially focused on that feature. The software asset management part of the market is more about consolidating data which can be provided by inventory tools but it also can be provided by CMDBs or different tools which are already installed in the companies. They provide different features like the ability to put into the tool all the contracts, what other licensing that I have bought. It also provide the ability to get the data from the inventory tools and work on that data in order to reconsolidate this data with the contract information. Most of them, they have catalog with SKUs, which is the unique identifier of the software, and they are the SKU catalog and they can match this SKU of the software which has been bought with the software which has been discovered. Providing that, they can provide some compliance position by comparing what you have bought and what you have deployed. They also provide some capabilities about optimization, the software and the licenses. Sometimes they provide some process and processing of your software asset management policies in terms of workflows or integrations with third party tools. It’s a little bit different on the market. Kay: It sounds like an inventory tool like yours should be part of any SAM programme, would that be correct? Maxime: Yes, the software asset management programme could be run without any tools, but as you know you need to have correct data in order to be able to do software asset management so you will definitely have a question of “should I buy an inventory tool” or “do I already have some tools in my company that I can use or extend in order to grab this information I already have somewhere, but I don’t use?” Maxime: Well, yes, what’s important to understand about the Easytrust tool is that it has been verified by Oracle, so we’re part of support vendor verification program. Kay: What does that mean as opposed to a tool that’s not verified by Oracle? Maxime: It means for database because this programme is only for database option and management packs, the tool can be used as a source of data in case of audits. You just have to push one button and you export the equivalent of the Oracle’s scripts results. It means the process is much more easy to run this audit and you are much more secure about the usage of that tool compared to another tool which is not verified. Kay: Oracle will take the data from your tool and rely on that data? Maxime: Yes, exactly. I just want to clarify a confusion which is usually made. Data which is taken by Oracle in the verification process, it’s a kind of raw data, it’s not calculated computer data. So one verified tool is not equivalent to another verified tool because what interests customers is not the raw data, it’s the computer data, the calculated data. There are many, many huge differences in the markets between different inventory tools. Some are generalists, we do on the Oracle and we claim to be able to do it very accurately. We’ve seen that on several customers on which we work. We’ve seen different tools, there is all the provide, it’s a generalist approach. The very spe...